This is well said,
mrmick. If you get into the habit of always coding with -w and 'use strict;', it will become second-nature and make things a lot easier when you take on a bigger programming challenge. It is also well worth it to make the jump from a bunch of random .pl files to modules with package names. It's not a difficult jump, and it will pay off big if you ever want to use any of this stuff under mod_perl or in any large project where subroutine names might otherwise conflict.
This is one of the nicest things about learning Perl: it's easy to take it one step at a time.