As for substantive perl content, I think smarter people than I have certainly covered it well.

One thing that comes to mind though is that if I'm being pulled into a training session on a new technology, whether there's a mandate that it be used or not, I generally need to be sold on it.

For example: As a C++ weenie it took a LONG time for me to reach for perl as a preferred tool for certain tasks. What finally did it was regular expressions.

If I'd understood something of the power of regexes early on it would have been a much quicker transition ;)