in Perl, every time you use the my keyword, you are declaring (creating) the variable that follows within the scope you are in. additionally, every time you use =, you are assigning a value to the left operand.
i don't mean this as an insult, but i would suggest you spend a little time learning some basic programming concepts before continuing further. it will likely be immensely helpful to you to be able to write and run Perl scripts outside of the emulator environment so you can test ideas or debug issues that you may have without having to launch the server or the client whatsoever.
there is some very good material freely available here to get you started:
http://www.perl.org/books/library.html