I know the POD can be indimidating. I resisted the POD's until after finishing the Llama book and most of the Camel book. But in retrospect, it was a self-imposed resistance; some of them aren't really all that bad.

In my previous post, I listed the POD's that deal with references, as it seemed that was where you were getting into trouble. I started with perlreftut, which is a tutorial on references. It seems (to me) to be the easiest one to grasp first. I recommended perllol second (discussion of "lists of lists", which is closely related also to hashes of hashes). And third I recommended perlref, which is a lot more involved, in-depth discussion of references. I probably also should have rounded it out with perldsc (Data-structure cookbook). If you take about two hours and read through each of those in approximately that order, references will soon become a familiar friend.

A suggestion that worked well for me; each day pick a POD and read it. You'll be done in a month or so. And even though at first some will be over your head, by the time you're done you will really be able to put the pieces together, and you'll be surprised at how much of it you start to understand as you read. I need to do it all over again now that I understand most of what's there. ...thanks for reminding me. ;)