I am truly sorry about my noobieness, but when I see something like that, I can't help but think "What the hell am I staring at?"

It's that sort of syntax which, at least anecdotally, is blamed for putting a lot of people off Perl. However, syntax is just syntax and the more you use it the less arcane it seems. Regular expressions are an absolute cornerstone of the langauge (and so useful that the PCRE is used in many other tools/languages to their benefit). So it is very worthwhile putting the effort in to learn.

There's perlretut for the basics and perlre for reference. Then you can dive into the various wonders of Pattern Matching, Regular Expressions, and Parsing. Take it slowly - get comfortable with the basics then add in one new extra feature at a time. You will soon find that they are as ubiquitous as everyone claims. Good luck and enjoy the ride.