I think it's about time for a significant rewrite of this tutorial. I agree that strict and warnings are important practices, and I am working through how to introduce them without scaring away the people I am writing for. I wrote an updated version on my own site, but it ended up being so long that I needed to split it into multiple pages (Part 1, Part 2). Part of that is because I am incredibly long-winded, but it's also related to the fact that we are describing ways to change the fundamental behavior of Perl to somebody who does not yet understand what that basic behavior is - or why he would want to change it.

So, yeah. I need to improve this tutorial, but I need to figure out the best way to do that while still being helpful for my original target audience.