at the risk of sounding obvious, Getting Started with Perl would be a great place to point many of these folks. Infact most of the Tutorials are a good place for Uber-Newbies to start.

If they still have questions, that should have at least given them enough that they could be posting rudimentary code in thier questions. And once that happens, well, it is much easier to help someone who has posted code. Even if eventually that code is completely rewritten through the answers in the node, the Newbie will go away much more enriched at having gone through the process.

Just my $0.02 ($0.032 CDN)

"Nothing is sure but death and taxes" I say combine the two and its death to all taxes!