Data::Dumper is a standard Perl Module that you may find extremely useful in debugging your code for Homework 4. This module imports a function that will print a human-readable list of all information contained within a variable. This is most beneficial for dealing with multi-dimensional data structures.

The page for Data::Dumper is at http://www.perldoc.com/perl5.6/lib/Data/Dumper.html. Here is a quick overview:

First, include the module by putting this line near the top of your code:
use Data::Dumper;
Then, call the Dumper() function and pass in a reference to your data structure. If, for example, you have a hash called %students that holds all of your information, you would type the line:
print Dumper(\%students);
This will print out all levels of data stored in your structure. For example, let's say our %students structure is a hash of arrays. The key of the hash is the students' last name, and the array is a list of integers representing homework grades. If I made the call above, it would print something like the following: 

$VAR1 = { 
           'Lalli' => [
                         100,
                         95,
                         86
                      ],
           'Smith' => [
                         87,
                         92,
                         100,
                         84
                      ],
           'Jones' => [
                         32,
                         81
                      ]
        };
This is very useful for figuring out what your data structure currently holds, and determining exactly what syntax you need to be using to get at the pieces of your structure you're looking for. I would encourage everyone to add another option 'd' for Dumper that just prints out whatever is in the data structure (don't print this option on the main menu, but use it in your own debugging process).