I'm familiar with the information that you have read. It was almost cool 10 years ago, but time marches on. As an experiment, here are two scripts: one uses Socket, and the second one uses Net::DNS. You'll find that Socket isn't satisfactory.

Socket

#!/usr/bin/perl -l

use strict;
use warnings;
use IO::Socket;
use Socket qw(SOCK_STREAM getaddrinfo);

my $hostname = 'www.perlmonks.org';

my ($err, @res) = getaddrinfo($hostname, "", 
    {socktype => SOCK_STREAM});
die "Cannot getaddrinfo - $err" if $err;
foreach my $ai (@res) {
    my ($err, $ipaddr) = getnameinfo($ai->{'addr'},
        'NI_NUMERICHOST', 'NIx_NOSERV');
    die "Cannot getnameinfo - $err" if $err;
    print "$ipaddr";
}
[download]

Net::DNS

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Net::DNS;

my $host = 'www.perlmonks.org';

my $res = Net::DNS::Resolver->new;
my $query = $res->search($host);
if ($query) {
    foreach my $rr ($query->answer) {
        next unless $rr->type eq "A";
        print $rr->address, "\n";
    }
}
else {
    warn "Query failed: ", $res->errorstring;
}
[download]