You mention CGI - although perl is very good for developing CGI applications, I would not recommend it until you get a better understanding of how perl works. CGI programs are notoriously difficult to debug. If you throw a beginner's understanding of the language and CGI programming together, you're likely to become extremely frustrated as you try to figure out how to figure out why your program doesn't work. Unless you have a very good understanding of how your webserver and CGIs work and how to debug them, I would recommend putting your efforts into getting things to work from the command line first and only moving on to CGI after becoming comfortable with the language.