I'm new to Perl. I want to learn Perl very, very well. So well that I can become a full time (maybe self employed) Perl developer, developing web based systems useful to my fellow humans.

In the case you go for self-employment, my recomendtion would be to scout some webhosting to find the one that fits your bill. Then see which OS they are using and learn/test/play Perl in that OS.

That will help you to see what the pre-installed Perl Modules are in that plataform (especially which version), and it will be easier for you to keep similar production & development environments.

This may ease your development efforts, because your scripts will be tested in a very similar environment as the one they will be deployed on.