What's with all the hating on VB? Have any of you actually even tried .NET?

Can I just download the same type of thing as Strawberry Perl and then code with Notepad++.

[...] His point is that your errors might be cleaned up by the IDE. I agree with him. [...] They're often used just as interfaces with other programs, they do have some power beyond that, but I wouldn't use them for anything particularly complex. For example, ChrisBot (#christf2 on QuakeNet) is written in Perl, and so are some of the scripts I run for my trading, but to be honest if I wanted to write something solid I'd write it in C++, or for solid web programming, ROR.

[...] But the way I'm suggesting allows you to do that as well. After getting an error pointed out to you right away you can look at it and work out why it's wrong and next time how to avoid it. Presuming you aren't retarded of course. At least, that's the way that I did it.

Thanks for the help everyone, one more question though - where exactly do you put perl scripts into use, are they simply used to do certain tasks on webpages and such, or can they be used for more complex things?

Why do you need to learn Perl? :)

[...] Every compiler/interpreter loves to print shit as errors. Really when you're learning though, you want to nail the syntax pretty much asap so you're only needing to deal with logical errors and syntax errors become something you find pretty much instantly when given the line number.

[...] I thought that at first, but in the beginning it's extremely helpful due to it spotting errors you may have missed. I spent many a frustrated hour learning programming due to errors I didn't understand, though, that may have been because the java compiler loves to print some shit as errors.

I spent many a frustrated hour learning programming due to errors I didn't understand

[...] If you're learning a language you're best off using notepad rather than a full blown IDE that basically types the code for you ^^