There's one fairly obvious error in that article: the fields are $F[0] etc, not @F[0]. Otherwise yes, that's a good way to make Perl look like awk. I personally translate awk concepts to more idiomatic Perl (I had no idea about -MEnglish, for example) but the concepts are still the same.
This random blog post gives something of the flavor.
https://lifecs.likai.org/2008/10/using-perl-like-awk-and-sed...