This answer and more can be found in perlintro -- a 20 minute read. To save time for this specific task (at the expense of leaving other questions unanswered), skip to perlintro#Perl-variable-types. Hashes are discussed there, and examples exist on how to index into a hash.

In your specific code example, you are dereferencing a scalar named $name as if it contains a reference to a hash. And presumably you are getting a strict violation at compile time because no variable, "$name" exists. %name is a first class hash, and elements are accessed via direct index rather than dereferencing: $name{$search}[0] would return 'main'. $name{$search} would return a reference to the array that contains 'man', and '100 - Main Street'.

Handling references is introduced in perlreftut.

print $name{$search}[0], "\n";
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my @array = @{$name{$search}};
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Not taking away from your insight, but I think it's important for future readers of any code to see where de-referencing begins.

perl always knows when anything in a (hash) structure is another structure and allows you to not require the deref operator (->) because it's implicit, but I'd recommend putting such in the path where dereferencing starts:

print "$name{$search}->[0]\n";
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Easier to spot where things become a reference at a glance.

-stevieb

See Data::Diver and references quick reference

#!/usr/bin/perl --
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dump qw/ dd /;
use Data::Diver qw/ Dive /;
my $plot = {
   'home' => ['main', '100 - Main Street'],
   'rent' => ['travel', 'Other State'],
};
my $of = "home";
print $plot->{ $of }[0], "\n";
print Dive( $plot, $of, 0 ) , "\n";

__END__
main
main
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