Perl and Activestate
PERL originates somewhere in the UNIX world and has been ported to the windows platform (WIN32) a while ago by a company now called ACTIVESTATE.
A Scripting Language
PERL is a scripting language and is known for its ability to process text very fast. Nowadays PERL can handle almost every task from network communication, database connections and so on.
Modules
This has been made possible by developing modules (mostly in C / C++) for PERL. Modules are separate files usually consisting of a .pm and/or a .pll file and available from CPAN (comprehensive Perl Archive network) and other sources (see links at the end for more).
"Active" Perl?
ActivePerl is the merge of the 2 previous available PERL distributions (CORE and ACTIVEWARE). You can download it at www.activestate.com for your platform.
What is the difference to other languages
Compared with Visual Basic and C I think PERL relates more to C. Longer scripts can easily look very confusing if you don't comment and format them properly. Perl is CASE SENSITIVE and hence not very tolerant with (typing) mistakes ;-(
What can I use Perl for?
Most people use PERL for either automating administrative tasks (write a .pl file and launch it with PERL.EXE) or in combination with a webserver to create dynamice web pages. Most UNIX based webservers have PERL support already integrated (like APACHE) whereas you have to install PERL on WIN32 platforms like Windows NT (IIS 4).
Installation
After downloading PERL just run the setup and by default you will find it in the c:\perl directory. PERL should now be associated with the .PL extension and you can run your first scripts by simply typing PERL myscript.pl.