Is placing z value of vertex in w enough to achieve perspective projection in OpenGL? I have been learning about projection matrix in OpenGL and I am finding it really hard to understand. All I know is that there are other configurations in the projection matrix besides placing z in w for perspective projection. What are those other numbers and why are they there? 
Thanks.
The projection matrix distorts the view frustum (the volume the camera can see) into a unit cube. So everything with all coordinates in the range -1 to 1 after projection is potentially visible, and everything else can be clipped.

To make things further away look smaller, we need to divide by their Z distance. We can't put this value directly into the matrix since it is different for each point we want to project, so instead we place each point's Z into its projected W, giving (X, Y ,Z ,1) -> (X', Y', Z', Z), known as clip coordinates. This is then divided by the new W to give (X'/Z, Y'/Z, Z'/Z, 1),  known as normalized device coordinates. On the GPU this division happens automatically after the vertex shader and before clipping and rasterization.

The general form of a projection matrix is

A 0 0 0
0 B 0 0
0 0 C D
0 0 1 0


The A and B terms relate to the field of view, higher values give a narrower view. Specifically, B is the cotangent of half the vertical view angle, and A is B/aspect ratio.

The C and D terms are bias and scale terms which map the near plane to -1 (0 in DirectX), and the far plane to 1. These are used for writes to the depth buffer to determine which objects occlude others. The depth mapping is actually a function of 1/Z, rather than Z, since this gives better precision close to the near plane, and allows perspective-correct interpolation.

Also note that in OpenGL, W' is -Z rather than Z, since we are using a right-handed coordinate system, with negative Z pointing into the screen.