Hour 13. References and Structures
If Perl is your first programming language, this hour will be interesting for you. In most programming languages, you'll discover a concept in which one piece of data can actually be a reference to another piece of data. Sometimes they're called pointers (Pascal or C), sometimes the technique is called indirect referencing (Assembler), and some languages have no concept of pointers at all (BASIC or Java). If you've never used references, pointers, or indirect referencing before, you might need to read parts of this chapter a couple of times; it can be confusing.
Perl also has these special kinds of values, but in Perl they're called references. References are used for many purposes in Perl, but in this hour ...
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