Your code doesn't check if two characters are used; it checks if one of [A-Z] is used plus two to fourty of [A-Za-z\-'].

If you really want at least two characters and the first one must be in [A-Z], use this instead: [A-Z][A-Za-z\-']+. It does the trick :-)

As for returning the warning string, I don't think that's a good idea, because both 1 and "Friendly message..." evaluate to a true value; hence, the caller won't be able to tell the difference easily. Return 0 or undef in case there's something wrong. This way, you can do something like if ($first_name_check) {.

The Cookbook sure is a good book, but I'd advise you to buy the Learning Perl. Trust me, it'll be worth the money and you'll enjoy the reading :-)