I can appreciate your frustration when using Perl::Critic without a copy of PBP. Long ago, I asked O'Reilly if I could have permission to quote entire sections of their book in Perl::Critic's POD. They denied my request.

So we paraphrased PBP in the Perl::Critic documentation. If you see gaps or inaccuracies, feel free to file a bug (https://rt.cpan.org/Public/Dist/Display.html?Name=Perl-Critic) submit a patch (thaljef@cpan.org) or request a commit bit (http://perlcritic.tigris.org).

Soon after Perl::Critic was released, some folks wanted pages numbers for the French or German translations of the book. Others wanted links to pages on http://safari.oreilly.com instead of dead-tree page numbers. And now that we have all sorts of e-books, it is even harder to come up with a truly universal form of citation (which sounds like an interesting project in itself).

A stringy eval() is perfectly correct in some situations, usually having to do with dynamically generated bits of code. But in most other situations, a block eval is a better option.

All software is just the sum of a long series of decisions. Perl::Critic merely provides you with reasonable defaults for some of those decisions. But all those defaults will be wrong at some point. IMHO, mastering the language means understanding when and why they are wrong.