Otherwise, just to confirm, regex is really a central skill for using Perl, because it is so deeply integrated within the language. Perl is know to be a language of choice for manipulating text data because of regexes, and it don't use them, your abilities to manipulate data becomes actually quite poor, because many things that can be done with special functions on other languages have to be done with regexes in the broader sense in Perl.

And, BTW, it is much less difficult to learn than you might think: regex may seem impressive if you don't know them, but there is nothing really difficult about them.