A little help please?

From: Joel (Trag16_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 01/31/04 

To: "perl" <beginners@perl.org>
Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2004 18:26:29 -0500

I'm interested in learning to program perl, and I just got ActivePerl for Windows. I am running XP and have a few questions. First off, how do I run the interpreter under Windows, preferably without the XP command prompt? Also, when I opened perl, it looked like the command prompt. Is the command prompt accesable through perl? Finally is the "#!usr/bin/perl line necessary under XP?

Thanks

Joel