I think I am close, but I am not as familiar with OO Perl to get it right. I basically want to create a User object and get data from the database for the user. Essentially I am trying to get this to work with other tables in the database, so more than one row may be fetched. Here is the User.pm I made:

package User;

use strict;
use DBI();
use Data::Dumper;

sub new {

    my $class = shift;

# Connect to the database.
my $dbh = DBI->connect("DBI:mysql:database=somedb;host=localhost","use
+rname", "password",{'RaiseError' => 1});
# Now retrieve data from the table.
my $sth = $dbh->prepare("SELECT username,email,phone FROM users");
$sth->execute();

### gets the columns from the query
my @columns = @{$sth->{'NAME'}};

### this maps the columns to their order in a hash
### so later with the value of the column key I can look it up
### from the final array
my %columns = map { $columns[$_] => $_ } (0..$#columns);

### this grabs all the data from the query, with the array
### having the fields in the same order as numbered in the %columns
my $self = $sth->fetchall_arrayref();

### this works here when uncommented
#   print "$columns{email}\n";

### this works and shows the column to number mapping
print Dumper(\%columns);

### same as below except ", 'User'" is added to end
print Dumper(\$self);

    return bless $self, $class;
}



###     gets the data from the database
sub get_user {
    my $self = shift;
    my $row = shift;
    my $field = shift;


###   just prints out the contents of $self variable
print Dumper(\$self);

###   In comments is what I want to do, call in the row and the field 
###   and get the proper data back, like...


#   return $self->[$row][$column{$field}];


###   but I can't seem to get the %column data in this subroutine.
###   when I run it I get: Global symbol "%column" requires explicit p
+ackage name at User.pm line 39.

###   but this is all I can get to work right now.
    return $self->[0][1];

}

1;
[download]

And here is the script making the object, etc.:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use User;

### create a new object
my $user = User->new();


### call some data, $object->sub(row,'field')

print STDOUT "User ID is:", $user->get_user(0,'username'), "\n";

exit 0;
[download]

The problem is in the User.pm I can't seem to figure out how to call the %columns hash in the subroutine. There may be other problems, but this one I haven't been able to figure out yet. Any help would much appreciated!