Pretty quick actually. If you start with "man perl", in the sentence, it directs you to "perlintro": If you're new to Perl, you should start with 'perlintro', which is a general intro for beginners and provides some background to help you navigate the rest of Perl's extensive documentation. If you read "man perlintro", when it first mentions variables, they are *all* my'ed. A few paragraphs down, there's a section called "Variable scoping", where it states The "my" is actually not required; you could just use: $var = "value";, immediately followed by However, the above usage will create global variables throughout your program, which is bad programming practice. And the next paragraph introduces "use strict".

To be precise, "use strict" is first mentioned on characters 8911 - 8920 of "perlintro.pod". Given that the pointer to perlintro happens in the first 800 bytes of "perl.pod", and the total amount of bytes in the POD files (that's excluding the documentation of modules) is almost 4.6Mb, the answer to your question is "after about 0.2%" of the documentation, not even counting the documentation of the modules.