I stuck around for local software guy Phil Tomson’s Ruby for Perl Programmers talk. This session was more technical, with the first code example showing up on the 4th slide.
Phil’s slides are online, so I won’t attempt to replicate them here.
Something listed as a “gotcha” actually seems to be a feature to me. Since all variables hold references to objects, you have to explicitly call .dup to clone an object. It’s more Java-like than Perl, but it probably ends up being higher performance since you only make copies when you explicitly want them.