Hashes are one of the most used features in perl and once you find out how useful they are you will never want to program in a language without hashes again.

And yes, access is as simple as with arrays, $names{phil}{street} will get you phils street name, if you put it in there. Note that arrays have still their use, for example to store a matrix. Or for any data you need a sorted or defined sequence. But in my experience for data structures in 4 out of 5 cases a hash is the answer.