It was a very long time ago (< 2000), so I don't remember if I ran across these topics. I worked through one of the popular perl books of the day, cover to cover. If the topics you mention are basic, and existed at the time, then I probably ran into them.

The language struck me as a poorly integrated collection of features. I found that it was a language that needed to be memorized more than understood. I suppose that if I had stuck with it long enough, I would have internalized the idioms and been productive with it.

Python was much more what I was looking for. I found it effortless to learn, and that my intuition was usually correct. If I thought something should work, based on my understanding of the language's key concepts, then it usually did just work.