The Advanced Perl Programming might help?<quote of the book>

Perl supports both concepts, and quite well, too. It allows you to create anonygmous data structures, and supports a fundamental data type called a "reference," loosely equivalent to a C pointer.
Just as C pointers can point to data as well as procedures, Perl's references can refer to conventional data types (scalars, arrays, and hashes) and other entities such as subroutines, typeglobs, and filehandles.
Unlike C, they don't let you peek and poke at raw memory locations.

** Update ** shortened the quote a little.