Perl - Introduction

               Perl is the acronym for Practical Extraction Report Language.Perl was introduced in 1987 by Larry Wall. Perl is a UNIX based language. Perl is a high-level, interpreted, general-purpose and dynamic programming language.Perl is Open Source software, licensed under its Artistic License, or the GNU General Public License (GPL). 
                 Perl Code is portable.When starting with Perl, we have to locate the path of the perl library.So,we use
                            # /usr/bin/perl
In the LINUX/UNIX system, we can locate perl using whereis command. This command returns, /usr/bin/perl. This is used as the first line of the source code.

Downloading and Installing Perl:
              Perl runs on over 100 platforms.The UNIX and Mac OS/X Operating Systems have Perl already Installed.Windows does not have Perl installed by default. ActiveState Perl has binary distributions of Perl for many platforms. This is the simplest way to install the latest version of Perl.The ActivePerl can be downloaded from http://www.activestate.com/activeperl/downloads .

               Perl for Windows:
                                 

• ActiveState Perl has binary distributions of Perl for Win32 (and Perl for Win64).
• Strawberry Perl: A 100% Open Source Perl for Windows that is exactly the same as Perl everywhere else; this includes using modules from CPAN, without the need for binary packages. Help is available from other Windows Perl developers on the #win32 irc channel on irc.perl.org
• DWIM Perl for Windows: A 100% Open Source Perl for Windows, based on Strawberry Perl. It aims to include as many useful CPAN modules as possible. It even comes with Padre, the Perl IDE. 

Source:
http://www.perl.org/get.html