Hey, I like Damian, and he has some great ideas, and has produced some amazing modules and applications with Perl. But I'm not going to write my code so it looks exactly like Damian's. No offense, nothing personal, it's just that I have a style I'm comfortable and doesn't do me any grief. While his book offers some very intelligent and useful best practices, you needn't cling to them as though you'll be left behind or shunned if you don't.

Damian finds that naming his references in a self-indicative way helps him (and readers of his code, no doubt) identify them and reduce coding mistakes. Bully for him! But I don't need to. And you sound like you don't either.

I'm not trying to belittle Damian or his Best Practices book; all I'm trying to say is that there is more than one way to do it, and Damian is explaining a couple of those ways. Absorb it, adopt what you like, recognize what you don't like, and deal with it.