perlfunc and perlvar aren't very hard to understand if you already have some programming experience. I suggest starting with those. Of course, they could be made much simpler by boiling them down to just the parts that people use a lot, and regex is complicated no matter how you package it, but I wouldn't go so far as to say the docs are useless in their present form.

You may also have missed the massive numbers of categorized code snippets in the Q & A section.