Thargor, you may find Perl Web/DB Tutorial helpful. But this is with eperl, whereas I'd rather use a more modern/robust framework.

Now, I have almost the same question, but more specific.

Can someone point me to a mock application (or open source real application) written with Mason or Embperl, including a framework for managing the db, that's all ready to go, and I can just start tinkering with it to suit my purposes?

I recently posted the result of banging my head against all the "technology soup" alternatives out there at Survey of Surveys on HTML Templating systems.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

UPDATE: Check out perlmonks' own tutorials which have a good section on "CGI (and related) Programming." I'm headed over there myself.

Also, I found a bunch of open source mason applications, which I linked to at my updated Survey of Surveys above.