Current Perl documentation can be found at perldoc.perl.org.

Here is our local, out-dated (pre-5.6) version:

Favorably in some areas, unfavorably in others. Precisely which areas are good and bad is often a personal choice, so asking this question on Usenet runs a strong risk of starting an unproductive Holy War.

Probably the best thing to do is try to write equivalent code to do a set of tasks. These languages have their own newsgroups in which you can learn about (but hopefully not argue about) them.