Thank you to everyone who gave great advice here, in the CB and even via direct /msg. I very much hope this helps people looking to expand and/or update their knowledge in regards to the prerequisites for Perl's modern web frameworks. In the interest of sharing what I've discovered and learned in my self imposed homework assignment, here are a few articles that address some of the essential knowledge discussed in this thread (in addition to what has already been recommended):

• How I Explained REST to My Wife: Basically how the web works in a fun dialogue.
• Rapid Prototyping with Sinatra: A nice introduction to MVC. Although it covers the Ruby framework Sinatra (AFAIK) you could just as easily substitue Dancer or Mojolicious.
• Step by Step Guides to Using Databases: Pretty thorough explanation of databases for beginners.