Read chapters 1 and 2 of Advanced Perl Programming by Sriram Srinivasan. Its an O'Reilly book. There are some excellent examples and pictures to describe whats going on.

Then, add "require 'dumpvar.pl';" at the top of your program, and use "dumpValue(ref);" to see how your data is stored. dumpValue requires a reference, so if you have "@array", you would use "\@array" as the ref.

The reading was good, but what really helps me when I get lost in my code is to use dumpValue to see what's really going on.

Brian