First off you need to fix your keyboard so that you can use lower case characters. Perl is case sensitive and will not like you at all if you shout at it all the time!

I have heard that Padre is a good starting point in terms of a Perl IDE.

See the Tutorials section for a pile of introductory and other stuff to get you started with Perl. Your very first Perl "script" could be as simple as typing:

perl -e "print qq{Hello world\n}"
[download]

at a Windows command line and pressing enter. If that doesn't work then you need to either add the path to the perl\bin directory to your path, or provide the full path to perl.exe.

Beyond that you need to use some form of editor to create a file with a .pl extension. Put print "Hello world\n"; in a file called "hello.pl", then with your current directory set to the same directory as the file you can type perl hello.pl on the command line to run it.

There is a Learning Perl version for windows users:

Learning Perl on Win32 Systems

Its kind of old but I'm sure its still applicable

Hi smaz, welcome the Monastery.

Strawberry perl should show up on your 'All programs' menu, and display a number of options including links to the Strawberry Perl documentation, the perl documentation, the cpan shell and a Windows command prompt, from where you can run your perl scripts, e.g. c:\perl YourScriptName.pl.

In addition to the Strawberry perl links you should now see on your computer you should check out:

• http://learn.perl.org
• http://perldoc.perl.org
• The Tutorials section of this site.

Others have pointed you towards various IDE solutions, if you take a look at what each has to offer I'm sure you'll find one that suits you. Padre is a Perl IDE written in Perl. To start with a text editor with Syntax_highlighting (such as notepad++) may suffice.

You may have noticed some messages saying you've lost an experience point, don't worry too much about this (see The Role of XP in PerlMonks). It looks as though your post has received a few 'down votes' from other users, I'm sure this is purely based on your text all being upper case. Don't take it personally or let it discourage you from posting in future. When posting just write normally, and pay attention to the Markup in the Monastery and How do I post a question effectively?. I appreciate that this (posting etiquette/formatting) may be a lot to take in all at once, on top of learning Perl but there really isn't that much too it. After a few posts it should become much easier.

Hope this helps.

Update: Added notpad++ link.

I recommend Eclipse with the EPIC plugin. It served me well on Windows (several flavors), Linux Redhat and more recently on my Mac. You can use it with Strawberry, Activestate etc. I use Eclipse also for other languages. The nice part is that are many plugins to integrate with other tools e.g. Subversion, Maven, Jira, Hudson to name just a few. See here for all the stuff that is available. So one integrated environment instead of having to glue the bits and pieces together.

But let me also mention some of the possible disadvantages:

• It's written in Java, if you are allergic it's a no-go.
• It's a big beast, i.e. not the fastest IDE in the world (some would say a resosurce hog;)

For me the advantages by far out-weight the disadvantages.

Cheers

Harry

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