First, reading the links provided to you is going to prove a great deal of benefit in learning new techniques and illustrate the mechanisms and concepts involved..The '->' is known as the infix dereferencer..it comes to play mainly in references, advanced data structures and in object oriented programming when you invoke constructors or call methods...etc. Consider reading this node too for it was very informative for me when I was confused...

Now let's see a demonstration example of an anonymous hash held in the scalar $hash:

$hash={
       'name'=>'Anonymous',
       'age' =>'mortal'
       };
       
print $hash->{'name'},"\n";
print $$hash{'age'} ,"\n";
[download]

Best of luck... :)