One of the nice things about Perl is that it comes with a built in manual. Type in the following command:
perldoc perlintro
and take a look at the section Perl variable types. You can also see this on line with the perldoc.perl.org section on Perl variables.
A quick overview:
- $foo is a scalar variable. It can hold a single value which can be a string, numeric, etc.
- @foo is an array. Arrays can hold multiple values. You can access these values using an index. For example $foo[0] is the first element of the array and $foo[1] is the second element of the array, etc. (Arrays usually start with zero).
%foo is a hash, this is like an array because it can hold more than one value, but hashes are keyed arrays. For example, I have a password hash called %password. This is keyed by the user name and the values are the user's password. For example:
$password{Fred} = "swordfish";
$password{Betty} = "secret";
$user = "Fred";
print "The Password for user $user is $password{$user}\n"; #Prints out Swordfish
$user = "Betty";
print "The Password for user $user is $password{$user}\n"; #Prints out secret
Note that when you refer to a single value in a hash or array, you use the dollar sign. It's a little confusing for beginners.
I would recommend that you get the Llama Book. The Llama Book is Learning Perl and is an excellent introduction to the language.
