Jumping first to your question about the existance of a $wizardextract -- well, yes there is: namely, use of elements enclosed by simple parentheses (eg  /(foo) bar (bat)/ inside the regex (more on this below)

perl -e "my $str='foo bar bat'; if ($str =~ /(foo) bar (bat)/ ) {print
+ \"\$1: $1; \$2: $2)\"; }"
$1: foo; $2: bat)
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Note 1: 'Doze quoting
Note 2: Other uses of parens exist but are outside the scope of your question.

The parens INSIDE the regex -- that is, between the forward slashes -- tell Perl to capture the elements they enclose (when matched) to the special $n variables. The only parens I found in the first half dozen pages of the text you referenced (TL, DRIA) are those required in the if (...) clause which may be a source of your misunderstanding.

Switching topics: you object to the author invoking chomp before introducing it. That's perhaps pedagologicly sound, but it also misses (missed?) a critical lesson about learning Perl!

You can use your command line and Perl's own documententation to understand (or at least get an introduction to) Perl functions. Here's an example:

perldoc -f chomp
    chomp VARIABLE
    chomp( LIST )
    chomp   This safer version of "chop" removes any trailing string t
+hat
            corresponds to the current value of $/ (also known as
            $INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR in the "English" module). It retur
+ns the
            total number of characters removed from all its arguments.
+ It's
            often used to remove the newline from the end of an input 
+record
             ....
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HTH

Update: fixed last closing code tag's missing < before the slash-c. TY, many times over, to choroba & hippo