The standard perl distribution does not include the modules needed to connect to the Internet.
Most perl modules are easy to install.
I chose to do the download and install as two separate steps because the install step must be run as root. You can browse the install script and convince yourself nothing evil is going on before running it as root. The perl module LWP allows a perl program to retrieve the content of a web site very easily. The hard part is usually grabbing the data of interest from the retrieved HTML and printing it in a condensed format.