just to give you all the info, there are some people who do not think that the

my $class = shift; $class = ref $class || $class;
[download]

construction is useful or appropriate in a constructor. I'm just getting into this OOP stuff myself, and have avoided that particular method mostly because of posts by tilly and merlyn. Tilly uses some examples you might like in A Cat's eye view of OO (though all of the thread might be helpful) and even refers to merlyn's take on the matter, ref($proto) - just say no!. and of course, there are excellent resources in the tutorials section, specifically the Perl Object Oriented Meta-Tutorial , which is basically a list of further resources.

good luck with the OOP in perl, from someone who's also in the middle of struggling with it!
--au