First of all, welcome to the Monastery. Hang around her long enough and you'll learn how to write Perl code the right way. It's helped me.

Two tips: I use Data::Dumper for checking variable values in Web environments, often live sites in emergencies. So, 1) I use:

print "Content-type: html/text\n\n";
[download]

to show the values, but still print the page to the browser. If I really want to stay below the radar, I open up a file on the server and dump the values there.

Nothing revolutionary, but nice to know when starting out with the module.