realmonk please forgive me in advance, I'm not ranting on you (but it may feel that way) but ... CGI::Ajax and other modules like it are *dangerous* IMHO. No, they're not going to blow anything up or cause catastrophic failure but they are going to prevent you from not only learning another language, they also obfuscate the natural boundary between server-side and client-side coding.
I think every perl dev should learn Javascript ... JQuery. Then learn a good templating module (HTML::Template, Template::Toolkit, etc.). Putting JS and HTML in your perl code is *not* 'peanut butter in my chocolate' nor is it 'red wine with chicken' ... it's more like 'driving and drinking' -- two really fun activities that should never be combined.