What constitutes effective Perl training for non-Perl developers? [closed]

Answer 1

I'm a java programmer who recently had to pick up Perl. The part I found hardest to get used to were all the special built in variables like $_ $~ $' and so on. Until you get used to them it's hard to keep track of which one does what.

And, of course, the use of regular expressions.

For example, I have to maintain code and when I saw the line below for the first time it was a little confusing. As a java programmer it looks like gibberish.

next unless "$_" !~ /^#/;