Virtualsue gave you a nice answer to your question. But since you are a Perl newbie I thought I'd take the opportunity to tell you (if you don't know already) about the excellent documentation that comes with perl, and is also available online. The documentation is called the Perldocs. The perldocs are installed when Perl itself is installed. At a command prompt you can do

   perldoc perl
[download]

to get started. In the "Overview" section you can see these listed:

   perl                Perl overview (this section)
   perlintro           Perl introduction for beginners
   perltoc             Perl documentation table of contents
[download]

So then to view the perldocs for "perlintro" you would do

   perldoc perlintro
[download]

at a command prompt. You get the idea.

Perl is a very mature language with excellent documentation available. You can also find the perldocs online at www.perldoc.com.

HTH.