First thing to do is to check which drivers you have at your disposal:

# From PGPLOT-2.20 test suite

use PGPLOT;

pgqndt($ndrivers);

print "Testing pgqdt() - $ndrivers drivers found...\n";
for $n (1..$ndrivers) {
  pgqdt($n,$type,$tlen,$descr,$dlen,$inter);
  print "$n:  $type $tlen $descr $dlen $inter\n";
}
[download]

For some examples, give the PGPLOT test suite a run, and take a look at the code (in test1.p, test2.p, ..., test12.p) that creates the 12 images.
Just download the source, extract it some location, cd to the PGPLOT-2.20 directory, and run perl test.pl

There's also a test script in the PDL source distro (t/pgplot.t) that you could take a look at. It uses m51.fits (also in the source distro) to create some images. You'll need to set the DISPLAY environment variable to a true value (eg 1) to run that script. If you're on Windows, you'll probably want to set the PGPLOT_DEV environment variable to /PNG (assuming you're happy enough to have the graphs/images written to png files).

I don't know if GD is a viable alternative to PGPLOT for you. You might find the coding a little simpler with GD, and it's certainly easier to get help with GD (as it's much more widely used than PGPLOT).

Cheers,
Rob