Actually my recommendation would be to start with a full blown IDE like Komodo from ActiveState. But now that they seem to have dropped the personal version it's gotten too damn expensive for anyone who isn't using it professionally.

The reason I recommend something like Komodo to a beginner is that you can get a much better idea of what is going on in your code when it is trivial to set break points and inspect variables. Komodo even provides a syntax check in the editor with syntax errors presented in tool tips on mouse over. That is a pretty slick trick and saves bulk time (when combined with use strict;) by flaging typos and missing declarations as you are editing.

But, as I say, Komodo is just too expensive now for someone who isn't using it to earn a living to consider.

Something like Komodo is an excellent way to debug code, much in the same style as the Visual Studio debugger.

For me, the problem with Komodo was its rather feeble code editor. I prefer Vim (though I have nothing against Emacs).

I'd like to think that the development of Perl 6 could be a rallying call for perl tool developers. The Reinvigoration of perl (in a commercial, enterprisey, hype-y sense) that is sure to follow Perl 6's release should not be dragged down by pathetic development tools.

Visual Studio and Eclipse are both excellent environments feature-wise (ignoring VS bugs and Java idiosyncrasies); it'd be sad not to have available tools of that callibre - for Parrot's family of languages - after the release of Perl 6.

Key features I'd want:
• Debugging: Edit and Continue support (ala VS debugger)
• Pluggable code-editor (eg: VS + ViEmu)
• Webservice discovery, client side code generation
• Packaging templates for various deployment types
• High-quality templates for CPAN module development
• Well integrated support for many forms of testing.
• Automatically set computer alight if UML diagrams even smell like being used
-David

Komodo Edit 4.0 is free. It doesn't have all of the bells and whistles that a full-blown version of Komodo would have but it's quite nice.

Komodo Edit is not an IDE. There are plenty of free editors around, but very few nice free IDEs that integrate well with Perl. The advantage to a beginner of an IDE (as opposed to a nice editor) is almost all in the integrated debugging - mouse over tool tips for variable contents for example. That sort of stuff can really facilitate understanding of things like references and nested data structures (AOA, AOH, HOA, ...).

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DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel