Again, I must recommend Damian Conway's "Object Oriented Perl". The beginning chapters cover most of these things so well that they will most certainly help you "see the light" by putting together all of the knowledge you seem to have floating about in your head. I find it helpful when trying to decypher these things to remember that most anything can be or return a reference - even to another reference to another reference...etc. That combined with knowing Perl's syntactical sugar will allow you to see the big picture before long.