in reply to list of lists (LOL)

actually you have hash references there. You want the structure to look like: [[1,2,3],[4,5,6],[2,3,4]] to be a list of a list.

To retrieve the second element in the second list, you can access it like this: question 1:
$var = $LOL->[1][1];


Arrays start with 0 for the first element, 1 for the second, and so on.