See Re^4: The best way to handle different type of XML files (Why I don't think much of XML::Simple) for my reply

Considering the size of XML::Simple's docs

It provides a lot of functions because it implements the DOM spec. You'll only need a few of them, and they'll be easy to find.

(even if we ignore SAX and the fact that you have to learn XPath from some other document),

In fact, that's the only thing you need to learn if you're doing data extraction.