Hello mmkstarr, and welcome to the Monastery!

You can program in Perl without using regular expressions. On the other hand, Perl’s built-in regular expression engine is extremely powerful — in fact, it’s one of Perl’s main features — so any effort you put into learning Perl regexen will be richly repaid as you put them to use in your scripts.

The official tutorial is a good starting point: perlretut. After that, you should read through the “Pattern Matching” chapter of the Camel Book,¹ although you can leave the final section, “Fancy Patterns,” till later. But, of course, the only way you’ll really learn regexen is by trial and error: write your own, experiment, and learn from your mistakes!

BTW, the language is called “Perl” (capital P, no A); the interpreter is called “perl” (no capital).

¹Chapter 5 of Programming Perl (4^th Edition, 2012) by Tom Christiansen, brian d foy & and Larry Wall with Jon Orwant.

Hope that helps,