What platform are you developing with? If you are programming in a Windoze environment, chances are your PC has ODBC drivers to access *.dbf files. All you need are to get the DBI and DBD::ODBC modules.

There are some excellent resources to get you started on using these modules:

DBI Reference
DBD::ODBC Reference

And for more general DBI programming help (this is how I got started):

Short guide to DBI (The Perl Database Interface Module

Hope this helps!
MrCromeDome