The implication in Programming Perl is that 'perlop', 'perlfunc', etc. are directly executable, not run as arguments to perldoc.

Furthermore,

$ perldoc perlop comma
No documentation found for "comma".
[download]

... i.e. perldoc is trying to display the man pages for both 'perlop' and 'comma'.

perldoc -f works fine, and I'll probably use the alias suggested by cdarke.

I'm simply curious about why 'Programming Perl' says that I can search perl man pages using the name of the man page and a Perl regular expression, and then I can't.

As irrational as it sounds, I feel a little cheated... that seemed like a nice little shortcut, and I'm disappointed that the Camel book has led me to a non-existent feature.