Welcome to Perl, and best of luck.

Sometimes, if you are starting, diving right into the specs can be pretty overwhelming. And the bundled perldocs are geared primarily towards programmers. Working through a good beginner book is a good place to start, sounds like you are working on that. There are also Tutorials here at PM, too. This one does a better job of answering your question about quotes.

In reply to Re^3: local variable syntax by fishbot_v2
in thread local variable syntax by yburge

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