If you know a scripting language, you can pick up the basics of perl pretty quickly. A great page to pick up on things is http://perldoc.perl.org/index-tutorials.html

Data Structures in perl:
http://perldoc.perl.org/perldsc.html is a good one on hashes. If you need to sort or process records of info, you will probably want to use hashes. It is basically a data table that allows one key and one piece of data. Yet, the data can be quite complicated.

For example, you are reading in input from the CVS rdiff command. You want to save this information to run other CVS commands. You should probably use a hash.

# Assume file has the format you desire: filename: old version, new version.
while ( <> ) {
next unless s/^(.*?):\s*//;
$rDiffHash{$1} = [ split ];
}