Yes. There are a bunch of different ways to do this. In fact, one of the problems I had when in your situation, was deciding which competing technology to use.

I would start by downloading apachefriends with modperl, and just study their basic install a bit to get a feel for how things work:

"Many people know from their own experience that it's not easy to install an Apache web server and it gets harder if you want to add MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use - just download, extract and start." (From the aachefriends web site)

You might then want to have a look at Survey of Surveys on HTML Templating systems, to see a comparison of all the various ways to get this done.

Personally, I favor mason, which comes with a nicely built sample application that includes db connectivitiy, if I recall correctly. Get that installed over your apachefriends install, and you are off to the races.

Good luck.