Thanks for this tutorial, a quick google search lead me to this page. Got the answer I needed faster than by searching the perl docs.

I was trying...
@array[0] = ("a","b","c");
but that didn't work.
What I needed was
@array[0] = ["a","b","c"];
so that I can read a value directly with
$value = $array[$y][$x];

Thanks again.