Setting up Perl for Windows Platform

For Windows operating systems, you can use the Win32 port of Perl (which was funded, in part, by Microsoft) available from Activestate.

Windows2000 Server comes with a free copy of Microsoft's Internet Information Server, which serves both HTTP and FTP. Many people find this server insufficient or inflexible for their uses. And users of the workstation version of NT, or WindowsXP, do not get this free server with their system.
O'Reilly's is available commercially, and also in a trial version.
This server is considered by many to be the best server available for Windows.

Today, Perl is widely used throughout the world. It comes standard on every major operating system apart from Windows and is still extensively used in web development, thus driving many websites. New startups choose Perl as their language of choice for data processing, system administration, web development, and other uses. As of this writing, Ricardo Signes, a long time Perl hacker, is overseeing the development of Perl. Perl 6, a new language with roots in Perl 5, is being actively worked on with several interesting implementations, including a Niecza, which runs on Mono/.NET.

This course focuses on 5.8.x and 5.10.x versions of Perl, even though support for both of these has offi cially been discontinued. Why?
This was a difficult decision to make, but there were several reasons for this decision. An important consideration is that surveys show most businesses still run these versions of Perl. Fortunately, this choice is not as bad as it might sound. The Perl 5 Porters (known as "'P5P") work hard to keep new releases of Perl backward compatible. Perl 5.14.2 ships with almost half a million tests (455,832, to be exact) to ensure that Perl works exactly as intended. Thus, what you learn to write throughout this course generally works unmodifi ed on later versions of Perl.