The goal is not to try to teach Perl programming in one article or with one script, but to try to give an entry point into learning Perl with a script that should also prove useful as you continue your learning process. The Perl language is not a difficult language, though it can seem cryptic at first blush due to all the funky punctuation which appears in the language.
Programming is about problem solving.
Very often one begins to tackle a problem by breaking it down into smaller problems and addressing those. However, when learning a new language, some of the smaller problems are often difficult because you do not yet know how to express the solution in the context of the language you are learning. This is when it is time to turn to the FAQ's. The Perl FAQ's are broken into 9 sections, each covering some related set of topics, and are included with any proper perl distribution. Let us say that we have some kind of question about sorting.