I learned Perl on Linux and have recently developed a Windows NT database-backed system based on Perl. I don't know what your ultimate goal is, but I would recommend starting with Linux and getting proficient with Xemacs, Apache CGI, and exploration of the CPAN (search.cpan.org).

Then if you ever really need to do something on Windows you could, with the knowlege of what correct operation is. Of course by then you still might decide to stick with a networked Linux box.

I find Windows is a constant obstacle to getting the job done, in particular the programming and building is more cumbersome than Linux and also I often come up with bugs which I wonder if they are due to Microsoft or not.

For example when I use a lot of memory in CGI (Apache/Perl5.004/ Mysql on NT) I found the browser to sometimes contain an error message at the top of the page saying that system resource or command was not found. This doesn't happen in Unix; Unix and C are the reference used in Perl.

Also you can easily take advantage of automatic download, compilation, build, test, and install of tons of packages on the CPAN all from the command line. This will give you tons of material to study. And the man page system is extremely useful. I'd say you would waste a lot of time trying to install everything with Cygwin and still you might have some missing pieces.

I have found that XEmacs for NT and Mysql for NT are useful. If you develop for Linux, moving your Perl programs to other Unix environments should be a breeze too.

I have only found a couple of times I wasn't sure if Perl would be good to use, which are generally when a big part of the system is already built in heavily Microsoft-owned products like FrontPage for example. Recently someone came to me with a request to redevelop their huge tax system using open source technology since they had to rewrite it whenever new Microsoft products came out.. but that kind of work costs serious money since they are locked in. Also, an ecommerce firm I work with does Java development (on Xemacs/NT but Linux is the preferred platform and the target OS) but you probably aren't thinking about Java right now.

Finally, I develop mostly in Perl, and try to limit the time I spend with C/C++ because it costs me money. I find ASP developers on NT (who are the rest of the crowd at my company) depend on button clicks and "support" provided by other vendors instead of really understanding what is going on. Recently someone had to spend 2 thousand bucks to buy a VB liscense (in Japan) just to download automatically a web page in ASP. If you know Perl, you know its motto: There Is More Than One Way To Do It (TIMTOWTDI) and it is true. I could have used the Net library, sockets, calls to lynx or wget or ftp, or some other bunch of ways to do it, all free. The way you pay is develop something useful and put it back into the CPAN. I'd say that is the best learning environment, and since a developer always has to keep learning, a great professional development environment too. I think you'll find that writing your own code and learning to critique other people's modules will be interesting and a good investment in yourself.

Regards from Tokyo,

Matt Rosin