Openning and reading from file in Perl

Howdy guys its been a LONG time since i have been on here! recently i am just getting back into programming and i am creating a program that will open up a log file and read some data from it and store it in hashes. anyways, my question is, how do i open up a file in perl to read from it? I think its a simple question, but unfortunetly i havent found a simple answer. if someone can point me to a tutorial or something of the sort, or better yet, explain it, that would be much appriciated. In the meantime, i will continue searching on google and other places for the answer. I am sure i will have more questions so stay alert! Thanks in advance...

http://search.cpan.org/dist/perl/pod/perl.pod

open (HANDLE, filename)

open (IN, "/path/to/foo");

At this point its just another file handle so you would input like with STDIN <>, so:

while ( $_ = <IN> )
{
blah;
}

close(IN);

perfect thanks i wish they just wrote that in the books... :)