Hi Dave & Toolic,
My thoughts when i read this post were on the same lines. I could not bring myself even to put the effort to put the regex docu link in the post :D.
On a serious note, i wanted to point out something i see in the documentation which could be hindering novice perl programmers from hitting the documentation up front.

• Perl documentation seems highly contextual, and assumes prior knowledge of language concepts
  As an example i was trying to create a package yesterday to house some code id written. I tried reading the perldoc for perlmod and while it did capture a lot of relevant formation in a less than succinct manner, a large section of the documentation is devoted to symbol tables, an area ive never needed to tamper with in the last 6 months that ive started re-using perl. Also i dont understand symbol tables or their full usage, apart from its importance of storing the package variables and maybe its importance in identifying the namespace.
• The documentation is disparate.
  I finally found what i was looking for what i needed to know and was not obvious to me i.e how to declare, how to export variables , quirks of @INC and finally how to import) on the perlmaven site in one page. Apart from a manpage like perlreftut or perlretut that u pointed, i am not aware of many places where the documentation is to the point and captures quickly the different aspects one needs to know.
  Perlguts i hesitate to even open(wouldnt it be better served if we had the actual language specification there for people to understand the grammar n whatnot),but i guess i have a long way to go before i deduce its meaningwisdom.
  Perlobj documentation refers to perlref in the first line of the text and perlref asks us to check perlrequick. For a new user,thats frustrating
  I guess the solution is to invest in a book (i have posted a question on the PM site for my specific needs Book Reccomendation for Web Development using Perl , and got awesome suggestions which i am acting on ) but no book will i think be able to replace man pages and perldocs for a lot of reasons, which are outside the context of this discussion.

these are two things ive been dealing with this week and they jumped to mind when i saw Dave's post.
My final analysis i wanted to share is regardless of the above, they are at best minor issues to a person who falls in love with the language or is dependent on the language for his their livelihood. So i hope my comments will be taken in the right spirit by all who read this post.