Beginner/Intermediate programmers are sometimes intimidated by an array reference or hash reference. The way I see it, they think ( or someone tells them ) that referenceces are complicated, so they get frightened and do things wrong.

Since you know that references are actually quite easy, you should be fine. It takes a slight bit of effort to keep track of when a variable is actually a reference to a hash, so you can use it properly, especially when deealign with something several layers dow a data structure.

But testing as you write code (Test:;Simple and test::More), and use of the Perl debugger and Data::Dumper when something doesn't seem right, will get you lots of working code in no time.

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