I think you're looking for On Scalar Context

Awesome, thank you! :)

I think I saw something like that but I can’t think of where or the context… har-har-har. There is this Context tutorial at least for now.

G'day KurtZ,

"... overview of builtins and their corresponding return values."

Many functions return different values based on their context. A couple of examples:

$ perl -E 'say grep $_ => (0,1,1,1); say scalar grep $_ => (0,1,1,1)'
111
3
$ perl -E 'say localtime; say scalar localtime'
51491621411701400
Sun May 21 16:49:51 2017
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So there isn't a one-to-one mapping between functions and return values. The important issue is to understand context itself. See "perldata: Context". Sorry if that sounds a bit blunt; however, without knowing in what way your "colleague is struggling", it's difficult to provide more specific help.

I don't recall ever seeing the "tabular overview" you mentioned.

"Looked into perlfunc and found only dispersed references.."

Yes, that's a large and unwieldy beast: I almost never use it! You may find the "Perl functions A-Z" is a lot easier to reference functions and find how they operate in different contexts: I use this regularly.

Looked into perlfunc and found only dispersed references.

Condense them:

man perlfunc | perl -n00 -le 'print if /scalar/' | less
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Are you joking?

Are you joking?

That would be best, I admit. But sadly, no. I don't have any tabular data on context driven behavior of builtins, so sorry.
But filtering that way gives a rough overview of context sensitive builtins, which should suffice for teaching purposes.
Anyways there is no way around reading all of perlfunc. All of it.

update:

Since

New colleague is struggling with Perl context

and context sensitivity is a fundamental concept of the Perl language, a cheat sheet would be of no help whatsoever, period.

perl -le'print map{pack c,($-++?1:13)+ord}split//,ESEL'