grabbing posted variables - putting in MySQL

Another newbie here (excuse me if my terminology is off) -

I am trying to write a simple form input-to-mysql CGI script and I'm stuck at how to access the variables posted to my perl CGI. All the information I can find accesses the posted variables via the QUERY_STRING environment variable, then splits them into name/value pairs, rather than accessing them directly by name as PHP does.

Basically, I need to get to the point where the variables are named so I can insert them into the SQL statement below.

Can anyone explain to me how to do this, or point me to a resource that can explain it? Thanks!

$sql = "INSERT INTO contact (prefix,firstname,middlename,lastname,address1,address2,city,state,zip,country,email) VALUES ('$prefix','$firstname','$middlename','$lastname','$address1','$address2','$city','$state','$zip','$ country','$email')";

Use the CGI module to extract the values from the input field names:

[code]
use CGI ('param');

my $prefix = param('prefix');
my $firstname = param('firstname');
....
my $email = param('email');
[\code]