Your coworker may not be aware of how powerful regexes are, and may be trying to do a lot of the scan/analysis the hard way. Regex memory is a great tool.

Does he know about substr?

And if he's going to be doing much with logs, then an intro to Time::Local would be in order (once he gets his feet under him). Ask him to come up with the average time between log entries w/o writing a time arithmetic routine of his own - instead learn the beauty of timelocal().

But to answer your question: no, these appear to be a reasonable start to learning Perl.