Hi! I'm still pretty new to Perl/PerlMonks as well, but I'd really recommend taking a look at perldebtut in the documentation. It talks about why you should start with

use strict;
use warnings;
[download]

as NetWallah recommended. Also, you will learn how to use the Perl debugger to step through one line of code at a time and really get a chance to watch as all the action happens. Like I said I'm still fairly new and learning more everyday, but stopping for frequent trips to the debugger to examine loops/conditionals, and especially as I learn to build more complex data stuctures, has not only helped me tremendously in writing working code and solving problems myself, but in UNDERSTANDING not only why certain pieces of code don't work, but often more importantly, why they do work. I'd take a look at the tutorial and then try to use the original code you posted to practice. I'll bet you can see exactly where @values reinitializes/empties on each round through the loop. Good Luck!