Why are you asking for an object's class? Typically a person needs this when they're checking whether an object is of a certain kind so they can either know what it's capable of or to somehow make a decision. If that's your purpose then you've asked for the wrong piece of information. If you want to know whether an object is of a particular kind, use $obj->isa( $your_class ). That will respect any normal object oriented ISA relationships. If you want to know whether an object is capable of doing something you can use the $obj->can( $method_name ) to ask whether it has a method of a particular name. You'll find these documented in the normal documentation like perlobj.

if ( ref( $obj ) eq 'Foo::Bar' ) {
    # This is generally wrong
}

use Scalar::Util 'blessed';
if ( blessed( $obj ) and $obj->can( $some_method ) ) {
    # We asked if the object could do something. We win. OO inheritanc
+e was respected and we played by the rules.
}

if ( blessed( $obj ) and $obj->isa( 'Some::Object' ) ) {
    # This is close to your original and is slightly deprecated but al
+so respects OO inheritance.
}
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