When you do know awk, and want to see/learn how the same thing is done in perl, you can use the awk-to-perl tool a2p that shipped with perl. The generated perl code is probably (very) inefficient, but at least shows you how the conversion could be done:

$ echo '/something/ { print $3 }' | a2p
#!/pro/bin/perl
eval 'exec /pro/bin/perl -S $0 ${1+"$@"}'
    if $running_under_some_shell;
                        # this emulates #! processing on NIH machines.
                        # (remove #! line above if indigestible)

eval '$'.$1.'$2;' while $ARGV[0] =~ /^([A-Za-z_0-9]+=)(.*)/ && shift;
                        # process any FOO=bar switches

$, = ' ';               # set output field separator
$\ = "\n";              # set output record separator

while (<>) {
    ($Fld1,$Fld2,$Fld3) = split(' ', $_, -1);
    if (/something/) {
        print $Fld3;
    }
}
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