PHP is also so simple to learn. I mean after 2 hours of reading and playing around, I am now capable of building a MySQL / PHP databased site and just plain simple PHP pages.
Although I haven't attempted to learn Perl, PHP seems to do everything I would ever need to, and is much more simple. Though I do have quite alot of experience with other programming languages. C++, Java, Javascript, HTML, Basic etc.
Yes you don't need to CHMod either, but you do need to be sure to protect your database password etc, when doing database connectivity. I would guess that megacool is correct in saying you need to php files that read/write. But usually you would be doing that to a database.
One more thing, usually you can make any directory into a cgi-bin. Unless your host restricts that.