Perl in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Installing on Win32

You need to obtain and install a copy of Perl yourself, unless you have had the good fortune of having either a system administrator install Perl on your system or access to a set of development tools to compile the Perl distribution.

The official precompiled Perl distribution for Win32 is ActivePerl, which is developed by ActiveState Tool Corporation (http://www.activestate.com). You’ll find that ActivePerl is quite complete, down to the availability of such modules as Win32 and mod_perl.

When Perl 5.005 was released, Perl developers could build their own Perl for Win32 from the same source kit that their Unix counterparts used. In addition, the Perl build mechanism for Win32 began to support more than just commercial development toolkits, such as Microsoft’s Visual C++. A Perl developer who wanted to build the Perl source kit with a free development toolkit could build Perl with Cygwin (http://www.cygnus.com), a Unix layer on top of Win32, or Mingw32 (http://www.mingw.org) with dmake, a set of Win32 runtime libraries that provide a Unix emulation under native Win32.

Tip

Unless there’s something specific that you gain by building your own Perl for Win32, then you should use the Activestate build, ActivePerl.