I'm the original poster. In answer to your question, I primarily want to learn Perl for myself. It's doubtful that work will allow any Perl development. Java has been declared the official language for all new development (mostly Servlets and JSP) by Senior Management at work.

However, since I don't care for Java -- at least as it's being adopted and deployed at work -- I'll most likely be "walking the plank" to some other way of earning a living. I could get another mainframe job, but I'm thinking it may be a good time to make a career change. I'm in my early 40's and have a couple year's living expenses saved up.

Developing web based systems is appealing to me. Perl (using CPAN) deployed on *nix seems a great way to go; especially if I end up running my own collection of e-commerce sites on my own *nix servers, doing the analytics, SEO and SEM myself.

I figure, relatively speaking, that there are pluses enjoyed and minuses suffered as a result of which OS one chooses to develop and deploy upon. But I don't know what those are for FreeBSD, Linux and Solaris 10.

I suspect there are different subtleties that crop up now and then with the way a script/language interacts with one OS versus another. But again, I don't know what these are, let alone how frequently they occur -- nor how they might affect server uptime and maintenance requirements. Is there meat here...or just mist and myth?

Also, there is the "context" an OS comes with. The richness and power of the user land, utilities and libraries....the quality of documentation...and last but not least even the "cultural personality" many typical working environments of the user base and community surrounding a given OS and development language exhibit.

Hopefully, I'll end up working for myself and will care mostly about suitability to task, uptime, performance and ease of keeping the servers up to date and secure. But if I end up getting another job, why not also do what I can now to pick the most kindred spirits to work with by picking the platform and development tools as best I can?

I seek to choose wisely and well. Thus my query to those here who, IMO, are wise indeed.

Sincerely and gratefully,

a humble newbie