I have never heard of "Perl from the Ground UP" so I cannot tell you whether or not it is bad. But be warned that there are lots of bad books out there, and I have probably heard of most of the worthwhile ones...

Anyways using features when you don't understand what they are supposed to be doing is generally a bad idea. That leads to cargo-cult programming, a subject which leads to rants around here from time to time.

In particular the only way you are getting away with your prototypes is that Perl is completely and absolutely ignoring them. Which means that if you ever try to write regular procedural code you will be hopelessly confused. For a full explanation try this rant.

Beyond that, try putting:

use strict;
[download]

at the top of your module and seeing how much it complains. While you are at it do not write to globals in packages outside of yours without permission. (Yes, I am talking about $::Lady_TM.) It looks like you have not yet learned about pod. The (commented out) locking code makes a number of mistakes. Starting with trying to lock the filehandle before trying to open the file. That simply cannot work (though you don't test for the error so you wouldn't notice).

Also for hashing you might want to look at existing modules. In particular the widely-used DB_File.