Are we obsessed with CGI? No. A quick glance at SoPW shows me a good sampling of what's typically there: questions about databases, memory useage, file system traversal, config files, parsing, speeding up regexes, playing nice with Win32, test scripts, and a whole bunch of other stuff. It's a well-rounded site.

If your friend wants some interesting reading that has nothing to do with web programming, I highly recommend the Advanced Perl Pogramming and Algorithms in Perl books from O'Reilly. Good stuff.