in reply to Which Perl version shall I use?
The current version of Perl is 5.10.1.
To be precise what advantage does one hold over other?
That's the problem, it is difficult to be precise because many of the differences are subjective.
Strawberry Perl is more of a community project and Open Source, so if you want to support the community and Open Source then support Strawberry Perl. It has to be said though that the installation of ActiveState Perl is very polished and seemless.
Installing or writing modules that have an XS (C) component can be an issue. If you have Microsoft Visual Studio C (MSVC) already installed then ActiveState is easy, but you do have to be careful with runtime library versions. If you do not have MSVC then you can download binary versions using ppm, but that is not complete and versons lag behind the latest.
Using Strawberry Perl we get the GNU C compiler bundled, but there is no ppm equivalent, although cpanp is easy to use.
Although it pains me to say this, if you are a begineer and for the maximum number of compatible modules I would go with ActiveState.