Very good attitude.

Once you go over the learning curve, this is all going to make so much sense to you that you'll be jumping up and down throwing confetti at random strangers and nobody will understand... but that's ok.. we understand.

It will not take long to get it, and seriously- it will be a blast. You can still have very intricate ways of associating and storing data but you can have an incredibly simple way to get to it.

With OO, you think of the modules (classes) as blue prints, as instructions on how to build something. And objects are the thing made, the houses built from the blue print, alive- and this only happens when you 'instance' (new) from a module(class).

You have your architect's plan, and you build from it 5 houses, they all have different addresses and people inside them, but you only needed one plan.

Anywho, forget everything I said and try it out. You can get an example working and understood in a few hours. After that you will think you 'got it'- and then a few days later you'll start to more honestly get it. This is what I went through.

Do you have the OReilly Porgramming Perl book? You should have a copy, you can get it off amazon for 10 bucks. You'll need it- it's very handy.

This is (un?)fortunately going to be an adventure, learning OO. There is no one place to 'learn' it. You will have to scavenge various sources, from each place you will attain a new facet of understanding. And you will have to experiment endlessly- which you will probably do out of sheer curiosity if not out of need.

Search the turorials section, there's really some very good stuff in there.

Most important, do not get discouraged if it's weird. Don't give up on the concepts until you can tell yourself you really understand what the idea of oo is.

I love good ol bash and straight empirical(is it?) functional programming - but for complicated stuff with thousands of lines of code...screw that! I need pOOp. (sorry... it's Friday...)

(Please excuse the very loose non technical language in this post).