How important is a Unix background when someone wants to learn Perl?

<rhetorical question>
How necessariy is it to know how the engine in a car works in order to drive it?
</rhetorical question>

When I taught a course in Intermediate Unix for Programmers at a local college in NYC I used Perl as a programming language to demonstrate how certain Unix functions worked and allow the students to programatically manipulate those functions in an interpreted environment rather than teach them C programming.

As some folks on this thread have already pointed out Perl is portable and runs on many platforms including Windows and therefore is not tied to Unix. A readdir for instance works the aame (more or less) in Windows as it does in Linux for instance. On the Unix platform it just turns out readdir is a standard C library call. (not sure about Windows.. not my thing.)

So, no, you don't need to know much about Unix of any flavor to use Perl and no it doesn't even help much. More important is to learn general programming methodology and concepts. Knowledge of data structures is a big help but that isn't even 100% necessary. Certainly knowledge of algorithms (sorting, etc.) is a big help. That can make the difference between a fairly good piece of code and rotten code.