Learning MySQL is beyond the scope of this tutorial. If you're looking for more information, I'd suggest going through some of the tutorials from About's guide to PHP / MySQL, Angela Bradley in the Learn MySQL section. The tutorial on Understanding MySQL is a good spot for a beginner to start.
When you are able to do some basic administration tasks, let's create a database called perltest and in that database, we will create a simple table called samples and populate it with some data. Here is the SQL you'll need to create the table and fill in a few records, just connect to your MySQL database and run them.
CREATE DATABASE perltest;
USE perltest;
CREATE TABLE samples (
id int(10) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
name varchar(128) NOT NULL default '',
phone varchar(128) NOT NULL default '',
PRIMARY KEY (id)
);
INSERT INTO samples VALUES (1, 'Some Person', '555-5555');
INSERT INTO samples VALUES (2, 'Another Person', '222-2222');