BrowserUk brings up a really good point. It is important for this new student to know about Perldoc, how to use them, and what's in them, but from the description of this student's studies (Java and VB) he learned on a Windows platform. A lot of the documentation still relies on *nix and C ideas, though this has been decreasing over the years.

This doesn't get mentioned often, so I thought I would second BrowserUk's comment.