The intro is okay, but it did not help Perl community at all. Besides, the article itself has some poor code. For example, if one wants returning nothing, return "" is a very bad idea, since to catch it in as array would make an one-element array which is true.

Perl is easy to start with by learning something like "Hello World!". Probably just because of this reason, most people stop at early learning stage. Perl was originally created to bridge the gap between C and shell. At the end, it is a language hard to grasp, yet very powerful.