Probably the most straight-forward explanation of the basics of references in Perl (IMHO) is perlreftut. Barring all the applications where you explicitly use references (comparable to pointers in C), references in Perl allow you to have multi-dimensional arrays and complex data structures (perllol,perldsc) as well as use object-oriented methods in Perl (perlboot). But this is all covered in perlreftut.

On an unrelated note, the language is Perl. The interpreter is perl.