Hello packetstormer,
for better general understanding, I recommend Advanced Perl Programming by Sriram Srinivasan, that book helped me very much.

Specially about your question: There are many ways how to initiate instances of classes, for instance:

• blank instance, initialized just by calling setter methods
• with hardcoded default values
• with values specified by argument of new method
• combination of previous 2 concepts
• new method calls init method
• etc., typically with usage of inheritance

I think the point is to design it in way, which satisfies your exact requirements.