October 2010
Intermediate to advanced
448 pages
15h 29m
English
Perl references act as pointers to information that is stored somewhere else. The idea is based upon C or C++ pointers, except that Perl maintains the structure of the referenced data in its original form.
You normally use a scalar variable to store the lowest level of a reference in the Perl code that originally initialized the reference. In fact, when a Perl module is initialized, its handle is made available as a scalar. From that scalar reference, all of the module's variables, libraries, and methods are made available to the original Perl script.
For subroutines, using a reference as a parameter makes it easier to update the data within the subroutine itself.
References are actually ...
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