Don't feel too bad about not contributing to the site if you're new to Perl. I'm relatively new to Perl (been using it for just over a year, and not that intensively), and I think, if you can't contribute something useful, then just shut up and read more nodes and learn more Perl things, so you can do so in the future. Or just tell people on your homenode what you're up to Perl-wise.
And please, don't start your posts with "I know I'm gonna get downvoted for this, but..." - this was originally meant to attract sympathy upvotes, but consider yourself lucky I'm out of votes today ;-)