If your goal is to be competant with Perl, I highly recommend you have a go at it yourself, and then refer it to your friend for a review. If you're concerned about security (which you should be), read perlsec and run your script with taint-checking enabled (-T). Every time you have a tainting violation, make a point to thoroughally understand why this is a violation and fix it.

By the time you're done, you'll be a bit better off, and you'll have a few ideas of things you would have done differently. Spend a month working on a different project, come back and re-write it if you want.

If you're going to risk security holes, I'd rather have a slightly insecure but proprietary application than a slightly insecure publicly available application. Of course, as you learn more, you'll figure out ways to watch for and correct potential security issues.

But whatever you do, don't just leave your first-time scripts like this alone after you're done with them. If you're a relative Perl novice, do try and re-visit your old code once in a while and make improvements or re-writes.

On the other hand, if your goal is to be up and running as quickly as you can, you're going to either have to trust what you install (either what's publicly available or what your friend writes), or know enough (or someone that knows enough) to do a thorough security audit of the application.