Since Perl is based on awk, sed, sh, and C, if you know one or more of those languages, you may be in a position to learn Perl faster, but it's not really necessary that you know them.
If your programming experience is limited, you might havfe to take a little more time with each lesson.
Because Perl was written for Unix (and has been ported to other operating systems), some knowledge of Unix is also helpful, but not necessary. Again, if you have no Unix experience, some of the concepts may be foreign to you, but they should not be insurmountably so.

This course is platform-independent and can be taken on any Win32, Mac, or Unix system. Platform-dependent instructions are provided throughout the course.
Perl Scripts can be developed on a Win32 platform and the best environment on which to run your Perl Scripts is a Linux/Unix environment.