Take a look at http://burtleburtle.net/bob/hash/doobs.html for an analysis of several hashing functions. I've used One-at-a-Time hash with very good results. The "my hash" (also known as Jenkins' hash) function is also good, but was complex to implement in Perl due to integer overflows. The FNV hash (http://www.isthe.com/chongo/tech/comp/fnv/) is also good.
