If those are your most significant complaints, I'd consider that be a ringing endorsement of the book!

As far as indexing... I highly recommend against using this book that way. For that sort of usage, you should look to the Camel. Learning Perl is intended to be a general langauge tutorial for beginners, and not a langauge reference. Once you are far enough to be needing to look up specific things, you should be moving past the training wheels book.