linux is my os of choice but at work, sadly, i have no choice but to use win32, where, i am greatly relieved to say, using perl is * not a problem * ( i use activestate's offering). whether it's easier to learn with a linux background i shall leave to other pundits; imho, however, parsing & reporting, perl's greatest strengths, are as valuable - and therefore learnable - on win32 as on linux; you can learn about perl 00 by using the win32 specific modules (eg if you have to create spreadsheets using COM), and you even go as far as writing XS wrappers & learning about perl's internals pretty well. i should add there are some vnice debuggers around (again, i use activestate) which i think are an easy way to get a feel for a language. the only thing you may not be able to do quite so easily on 95, 98 &c &c is fork(), so there are limitations, but i imagine this does not preclude learning about other things.