No, what I am saying is that if I have to teach someone perl (or any other programming language for that matter), the last thing I want to show is actual references and explain how they work since this requires me also to tell about how the memory layout of a machine is, how transfer of arguments work etc.
If I feel that the person I'm teaching is currently not able to cope with this, I wont squash him with something that will make him go home feeling he is totally lost.
Rather I will try to teach him regular expression, hashes and arrays. Why do you think that the book Learning Perl doesnt even cover references?