[oak perl] newbie array question

[Sandy Santra]

Hi, I'm a very new newbie learning arrays.  Apologies for
the length of this--it's all just a little hard to grasp
at this point. 

I have a perlintro document that says don't bother using

$#array + 1

for determining the number of items in an array, implying
there's a shortcut.  But it doesn't really give me a simple(r)
way of doing it. 

I just want the print command to produce the number of items,
but none of the following work: 

print @arrayname;
print '@arrayname';
print "@arrayname";

I was hoping at least the first of those would, since I
thought something without quotes usually implied same was
a number, and Perl is supposed to give me a number when
it sees @arrayname in a scalar context, right? 

Is this the only way to do it...

print scalar @arrayname;

???

Seems longer than

print $#array + 1;

(if that even works)

So I'm a little confused, partly because I'm reading a chapter
on arrays and the print command is used in almost none of
the coding examples.  

Any help appreciated.  Thanks.

--Sandy Santra