My personal recommendations would be s///, or substr on the left hand side of an assignment, or the 4 argument substr. A demo of each:

($chopped) = $s =~ s/^(.)//s;
# or
$s =~ s/^.//s;
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substr($s, 0, 1) = "";  # no way to get the value back, though...
# Note: you need the parens. Precedence of the assigment is higher tha
+n that of the comma.
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$chopped = substr $s, 0, 1, "";
# or
substr $s, 0, 1, "";
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Why? I think these must be quite fast, and simple enough. I doubt reverse is that fast, especially on long strings.

You can always use substr as a function, but I'd only do that if I need to keep the original value of the scalar, and get a modified copy.