My friend, with all due respect not all developers have access to books, in this example the guy is from Delhi and he simply cant afford to buy the books...

Well, I work with a bunch of engineers originally from Mumbai, and I gotta say that they are a pretty sharp .. in case that was a slight against anyone from Delhi.

If I were you, I'd buy a copy of Learning Perl and ship it to your co-worker. I'd also encourage him to join Perl Monks and read the site -- tell him not to post anything, just read and learn for the first month or two.

Re-writing basic Linux/Unix utilities in Perl is also good make-work -- that ought to get him kick-started into doing Perl development.