Having listened to Schwern do a lightning talk at YAPC 2001 about how the AUTOLOAD syntax was broken for a particularly odd case of inheritance (I think my brain started to melt after the first minute), I've generally been successful at avoiding AUTOLOAD. Unless your folks are fairly up to date on OO programming, I'm not sure they'll get AUTOLOAD, which seems to magically instantiate object methods as necessary (shudder).

Instead, I'd recommend something like Class::MethodMaker -- that's pretty cool OO stuff, and it's something they can probably use right off the bat.

I'd also highly recommend some time on Perl one-liners and on the Perl debugger.