Since 2002 the Perl community has changed a lot, mostly towards better development practices.

A first (and of course incomplete) list of things to have a look at would be:

• Perl's Best Practices, for the current... best practices in Perl devlopment (and Perl::Critic to see how they can be checked automatically in your code),
• Devel::Cover to better test your code,
• Moose for the latest bestest OO system,
• CPANTS to see what a modern module (and by extension any code) is supposed to look like,