in reply to Re learning Perl

Given the code you have shown, you certainly don't need to to go through the early chapters of Learning Perl, you obviously master the key basic aspects of the language (or know to get back to them through the documentation). But since you implied, if I understood correctly, that you covered only 70% of that book, it would probably be worth go back to the 30% left (or perhaps going back a little bit, say the last 40%) before moving to Intermediate Perl.

Chromatic's Modern Perl has also been suggested. It is an excellent book, and I know it in a fairly detailed fashion for having been the translation and technical editor of its French translation in the last months. IMHO, it is likely to get you faster to Perl fluency than Learning Perl and Intermediate Perl. You asked whether it is for beginners. Well, yes and no. Modern Perl covers all the basic material and much more, but it is not really geared toward pure or very early beginner because, despite all the good that I think about this book, it has in my mind one defect: it is not really pedagogically organized for beginners. (BTW, for pure or early beginners, Beginning Perl, by Curtis "Ovid" Poe, is in my view another very good choice.)

Just one example on Modern Perl's problem (only for pure beginners, IMHO): a relatively complex subject such as dealing with Unicode is presented 25 pages into the book, while elementary things such as conditionals, looping directives and control, scalar and array assignments and other very basic concepts are explained much later. So, in my view, this is really not a book for a pure beginner, but more a book to really improve your Perl when you already know quite a bit of it. But since you are not a pure beginner, this might very well fit exactly your needs.

Having said that, I would say that the best would be for you to use both. Each author has a different viewpoint and, although the Perl community has built a common corpus of best practices, reading different authors enrich your knowledge.

Je suis Charlie.