I agree with the last bit - there are lots of modules that have one or two useful methods that one can just use intuitively. LWP::Simple comes to mind - it's not the most flexible or robust way of implementing a web client, but it takes seconds to get the hang of it and it's good enough for many situations.

One of the first modules I got to grips with was CGI, and I shudder to think how much time I'd wasted before that doing things by hand that it would have let me do automatically.