Well, interpolation of control chars is a major feature of many programming languages, not just perl. Surely you've seen something like printf("Hello, World!\n"); before?

I agree though, finding your way around perl's extensive documentation can be a scary thought. I suggest you look at perlintro if you haven't already, and from there take some time each day to at least skim over the other perl tutorials. http://perldoc.perl.org/ is a very convenient way of reading the docs and the tutorials are listed here.

Good luck