I'm still making rookie mistakes, does it ever end? Thank you.

Yes :) just practice more and draw big circles when you encounter a rookie mistake, in no-time-flat you'll stop making them :)

Common Perl Pitfalls / perltrap

Tutorials: Basic debugging checklist , brian's Guide to Solving Any Perl Problem

perlintro, http://learn.perl.org/books/beginning-perl/, http://perl-tutorial.org/, Tutorials: Basic debugging checklist , brian's Guide to Solving Any Perl Problem, Modern Perl book, a loose description of how experienced and effective Perl 5 programmers work....You can learn this too.

The Perl Monks Guide to the Monastery

I say that you know a programming language decently when you are able to write a non-trivial block of code and not have any syntax errors in it. More points if it works correctly on the first try, too :-)