Although you complain that the responses are vague, they are not. The API exposed by Net::LDAP is pretty much a Perl equivalent to the OpenLDAP C API. As such, if you want to be able to get the information for a single entry, you need to go through the bind and search steps

The bind can be anonymous, if you LDAP server allows it and allows retrieval of the object whose DN you already have. If not, then you need to bind with that DN and provide the password associated with it. Once you do the bind, you can do a search for the DN. Once you have the search, you have the attributes and values associated with it.

Even if you do a non-anonymous bind, what returns in Net::LDAP is a connection variable, not a hash or array of information on the entity that made the connection

Your experience with Windows and Visual Basic has led you to believe that there is some magical way to say, "I have this DN, give me the attributes associated with it". Although the API you were using made this easy, behind the scenes what was happening is what you have to do more explicitly if you were using, say, C, Perl, or something else