I very first learned to use Perl on Win32. I downloaded ActiveState's distribution and used "Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 21 days" as my guide. The book was written for the Unix platform, but there was very little I had to change to make the same examples work on Win32. Other than being written for Unix, I would say that Sams is the most simple and straight to the point book I have ever read on the subject. I have read several more books on Perl after reading Sams, including Oreilly's "Learning Perl on Win32", but none of them come close to teaching the language to a beginner as well as Sams - IMO.