"Red Hat Perl" is merely a distribution of Perl that happens to be packaged for the Red Hat Linux distribution. It's essentially the same Perl that ActiveState packages for a Win32 distribution. The significant differences are in the platforms, not in the Perls. There are some thing you cannot do on Win32 that you can on *nix (e.g., shared memory), and visa versa (OLE).

Style is, for the most part, unrelated.

Any good Perl book should help you learn on either platform, with the exception that Learning Perl on Win32 Systems is slanted towards packages only available on Win32.

Thank you dws. That was very helpful in clearing up what the different names mean. I may be a noobie but I understand what you are saying. Thank you very much for your great explanation/answer. -Noobie

jeffa

Thanks you Jeffa, for the honest reply. I bought the Llama and I am sure I will understand perl when I am done with the book. Thank you very much for your input. :) -Noobie

You hit on one of the very most attractive features that Perl offers. That is its resilliance to re-porting. My largest Perl project was an EDI parser and store and forward system for serious manufacturing support. Due to circumstances I authored it on Win2K with ActiveState, but I needed to test it in quasi production mode. My test choice was under RedHat 6.2 with its native Perl distro. I modified just a few lines for file locations. It sprang up like a Gazelle in heat! I made a few mods to take care of weird states unrelated to the OS.

Then...

I had to move the same code to a production server at an ISP in Detroit. This was an NT box with ActiveState again. The code slipped in like hand in glove. There was really no major point where I had to say "This is the operating environment and it causes problems X or Y so I have to code this way." This flexibilty is a great power in your hands and drives proprietary vendors absolutely nuts.

Perl is from the coders, for the coders and by the coders and never let it perish from the earth.

Diskcrash

There is Learning Perl on Win32 Systems which I would get were I using Perl on Win32.

99.5 percent of what you do will be the same. As one who endeavored to learn, alone in the wilds, K&R C on Xenix from mostly CPM orientated references; I will point out that tripping over that half percent can be a hard fall. Use the operating system of your choice.

Having the right documentation makes all the difference.

You might surmise that I like books.

One thing that many people have missed is the fact that ActiveState's version of Perl isn't just for Windows. They also produce versions for Solaris and Linux.

Of course, I don't know anyone who uses it on anything other than Windows :)

"The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club."
-- Chip Salzenberg

The only thing in that book you can't do on a Mac, from memory, is dbmopen which is pretty much deprecated even on UNIX as I understand it.
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