Perl is a general purpose scripting language, which is often called "the glue of the internet". It is very flexible and powerful, and so it can be easily misused, which leads to a history with lots of misunderstandments, so, whatever you heard about Perl before, please forget it first, and start getting a feeling for the modern and new culture of Perl.
For getting a really complete overview of the current culture of Perl, we strongly suggest reading of the free modern Perl book of Onyx Neon. But we will give a small overview of the most important things to know here, if you already know other languages and are aware of developing by itself.
At first its important to understand that even if Perl is a script language, many of the modules uses compiled C code, thats why you cant just copy together some Perl modules (the .pm files) and think this work. An installation of a Perl distribution is a specific process, which is covere