It's scary for the people I'm writing to :-) Tutorials like these are for my dad or brother, who have never fiddled with another programming language for more than a few minutes. The script header bit is just getting them into the habit of documenting in the first place. I agree that once they're ready for POD, they should switch over. But as it is, I'd have to explain POD, formatting, perldoc, and package global variables (which means I'd have to at least glance at packages and scoping).