First of all, please accept this in the spirit intended... I've programmed in Perl for about 6 years now. I started doing OO Perl about 2-3 years ago, but recently I realized that (OK, I'm about to utter blasphemy in the Monestary don't flame be too bad) that Perl's OO model is so kludgy and the code is so ugly that I needed an alternative. My point here is that to really learn and take advantage of OO techniques you may need to go to another language.

I found OO peace in moving to Ruby, and I might add, the move is quite easy if you're coming from the land of Perl. Others find OO nirvana in Python, but the move to Ruby seemed a lot easier for me. I've been programming in Ruby off and on (I still have to use perl at work primarily) for about three months now and already I feel more comfortable with it than with Perl. Look, I know this will be seen as advocacy, but I'm just trying to help out other tormented souls :-)... Check out http://www.ruby-lang.org for more info on Ruby. Ruby has a very clean OO model. It has a lot of the same functions for dealing with strings (like chomp, for example) as Perl (and in fact it has a lot more built-in goodies like reverse). Also, I find that threading and timeout (Ruby's equivilent of alarm) work on the Windows platform (Perl's alarm still doesn't work on the Windows platform).