Welcome Leena

You have had some good advice here so far. My standard production environment, and that of the majority of the internet it seems - is apache web server with perl or mod_perl on linux servers - but somebody else has the fun job of installing them and maintaining them. My experience of recently setting up a development environment goes like this:

1. Xitami is a nice web-server out of the box, but the SSL implementation is not free - it has a $2500 licence fee.
2. IndigoPerl is nice, it is implemented by a member of the Toronto Perl Mongers and does install and work well. It is a good compact development environment if you don't need to use mod_perl.
3. IIS is a pig and everything seemed to be counter-intuitive. Although I have had an IIS install on my LAN for about 6 years (regularly updated and whatever) I only use it for intranet documents and nothing else.
4. I decided after some considerable installing and uninstalling that none of this could be worse than doing Apache/mod_perl/SSL in Linux. Which I did. There were many problems, but perlmonks and the various mailing lists were a great help over the few days of the installation adventure. ApacheToolbox was a great help and if you go the *nix route then use it at least until you have enough experience to attack the problems confidently.
5. I was not aware of the binary package from Apache for win-32 with all the goodies. If I hadn't switched to Linux then this is probably what I would use.

Good luck, whatever happens I expect you will learn a lot and maybe even have some fun.

jdtoronto