"Learning Perl" is meant for beginners, so it explains things slowly and easily understandable.

If you need more of a summary, there are many other resources you might consult instead, most notably perldoc, "Programming Perl" and "Modern Perl" -- depending on what level of details you need.

You want someone to write the Spark/Cliff notes version of Learning Perl?

Each chapter has questions at the end. Gather the questions that are interesting/useful to you. Go back in the chapter to help you answer those specific questions. If you have trouble with the questions, come back and search the archives as it's probably been discussed here before.

You may find this helpful: Getting Better at Finding Answers

The following are the chapters I think are the most important to read first: Chapters 1 through 7 and chapter 10. If you need more knowledge about regular expressions then read 8,9. If you want the main ideas look at the table of contents (http://oreilly.com/catalog/0636920018452 or open the book).

I would like to stress that I am not saying that the chapters I didn't include are not useful/important/good. They are all of those things and more. But I feel that the most important chapters (in terms of learning Perl) are the ones I listed.

This is a great book and I do not agree that:

there are a lot of details in the book that I DON'T NEED to know NOW.

If so can you pull out the Main Ideas from each chapter

It is called the table of contents :)

You can skim through the book, copy each chapter introduction/headings/summary, and you have the verbose version of Main ideas