Dear Monks,

I'm the oiginal poster. A warm hearted thank you for taking the time to so kindly share your helpful advice. I very much appreciate it. I have given each of your postings a lot of thought.

It's always a bit of a crapshoot to offer input when one doesn't know much about the Perl newbie asking the question. But I sure am glad each of you have shared as you have!

FWIW, I do understand that for purposes of learning Perl initially, the OS chosen won't be a super big deal. But, as correctly gleaned in the following snippet by dwildesnl, I do have in mind progressing to develop fairly advanced systems. So I would like to pick an OS that won't hinder me at a minimum. And I do like to develop an in depth mastery of the tools I use.

There does seem to be merit in developing on the same OS one will be deploying production code upon. At least for someone like me who wishes to run their own servers. But I simply don't know how much difference there is in effective and secure server administration of -- let alone the nuances of perl executable code interaction at the OS level with -- Linux vs FreeBSD vs Solaris 10 vs Windows; thus my query to you all.

Dwildesnl's snippet:
<snippet>
The OP is coming from COBOL, one of the most insular programming systems ever developed. Given that he was talking about nuances of system calls, I suspect that he has visions of apps that push Perl around corners that go a little bit further than CGI.pm intended. It is true that _learning_ Perl can be done on any scriptkiddie car that will run it, but deploying a Perl app successfully in a commercial environment demands stability, consistency, and predictability. When I have direct commercial success in such an endeavor, and FreeBSD has cushioned my @ss in doing so, should I not spread the word?
</snippet>

Dwildesnl's combined postings in this thread suggest a lot of merit to going with FreeBSD. At this point, that seems to be the way to go, since I also want *nix servers as robust and trouble free to admin. as I can get as a newbie server admin. Now I just need to choose between FreeBSD 4.11, 5.4 and 6.0 (beta) for learning and deployment. ;-)

As a technical person, I very much admire you all. I feel very fortunate to have found this place. I hope to advance to the point where I can one day stand close to you all in Perl ability. Please know I shall study and code dilegently to do my best.

Thanks again and best wishes to you all,

a humble newbie