I get a warning that the specfied usage is deprecated:

perl -we "@alpha = qw|d e f g h|; print @alpha->[shift,shift];"
Using an array as a reference is deprecated at -e line 1.
Use of uninitialized value in array element at -e line 1.
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When I ignore the warnings I get 'd' with the above, so 'works' means it is not doing what I would think it should do and returns the first and second elements:

perl -e "@alpha = qw|d e f g h|; print (shift @alpha, shift @alpha);"
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Perhaps it will work in different environments though. I'm running This is perl, v5.8.0 built for MSWin32-x86-multi-thread

Also, the pod doesn't have that as an example...where did you get that example from?