Kudos for the neat example and the very organized code you write, keep up that practice. You've come to the right place, here you will learn by example, and not only text-book examples, we're talking real Perl situations met daily by monks scattered all over the globe here. I learnt a lot by hanging around the place.

"I am still trying to get my arms around understanding the use of hashes."

Make sure you've identified with the various ways to create/access and manipulate hashes and arrays before going the extra miles into references and advanced data structures. That way it becomes easier and quicker to grab the concept quickly. The Monastery is brimful of timeless resources for you to look at, for example :

• Tutorials->References
• Arrays: A Tutorial/Reference
• Super Search

And then you have %perldoc perlcheat from your command line to serve as a quick primer.. Have a nice Perl journey...