Why are you pointing him at networking? It's a serial device!

Perl works fine; it just doesn't have all the CPAN to call on as standard.

First get your hardware working. You'll need to feed power to the usb to serial adapter and to the 770 to get the usb host working. That's the fun part.

The software should be fairly straightforward unless the usb to serial kernel module isn't on the 770 out of the box. Sorry, can't check atm, mine is elsewhere :-(