Please see perlintro and http://learn.perl.org/tutorials/.

I don't use windows, but I've heard other people recommend Padre.

A recently published free eBook is Modern Perl.

Oh, and I loved the Perlmonks FAQ and especially the Perl documentation documentation.

As a good, free editor (well, it's a full-blown development environment) I encourage you to look at Eclipse with the EPIC plugin.

Thanks guys, will check those out and decide for myself.

The public library is free, and therein you will may find the Llama book, Learning Perl. That's the best book I know of for someone starting out with Perl.

For editors, I happen to like SciTE. Look for it here: http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html. It's an open source project, and works great for a plethora of languages. It does syntax highlighting, of course, too.

Personally I use the Windows version of XEmacs (from http://ftp.xemacs.org/xemacs/binaries/win32/InnoSetup/). I find that the ability to define macros is invaluable, especially when manipulating large text files of information. And it doesn't interfere too much when I am writing Perl.

Indeed the first thing I do when I get a new Windows machine is to install XEmacs, Cygwin and Perl (in that order). I realise that it's not to everyone's taste but it works for me.