Joel -
Don't take this the wrong way, but I would suggest grabbing a powershell book from amazon and flipping through it
Also, for general powershell questions, I would use a forum site @ powershell.com or powershell.org.
Even though i'm just a customer, this community is for Powershell for Netapp mainly
But to answer your questions += usually when you stuff an array of custom objects, and $filers = "1","2" - creates an array so you can do something like $filerrs | % { }