Is it this site where there is a list of players and what strings they use?

I think it says Perlman uses straight Dominants. But who knows where these "facts" come from. Well, sometimes it's interviews, but it's always hard to verify.

No, here's such a site. (Zuckerman, not Perlman) Take it with a pinch of salt.

Although I generalised and said, don't change your strings, obviously if you are using Chinese unbranded strings, then that's a little bit too risky. (in the guitar and ukulele world you can get people playing with nylon strings so bad that we call it fishing line, and sometimes it is literally fishing line, and I'm not talking about fluorocarbon, which can be acoustically excellent).

I thought someone said Fiddlershop strings were like Pirastros but cheaper?

When I began, my teacher said, "Tonicas[edited] or Dominants will do". Then I saw this Shar chart on vcom. I looked through it and eliminated steel and gut and things that cost $100 or more, and quickly ended up with Tonicas[edited] and Dominants.

So I'll reiterate - beginners should choose something at random from the middle of the chart and stick with them. Nothing will sing for you without your learning how to make it sing.

@AndrewH 

Sorry, I meant "Tonicas", not "Pirastros". Yeah, in citing my poor memory, I'm being too conversational for the more formal medium of a forum.

I see that I said "Pirastros" three times. I've edited the 2nd and 3rd as they are sort of informational, but I've left in the first so that your reply retains its sense.

Peter said
...one of the last things I remember of that was 'Kreuzer 2', and so off I went to find the Kreutzer 42 Etudes (an upgrade of the 40 Etudes...), found that No.2 is renumbered as No. 3 in that edition. I had dismissed Kreutzer as 'too advanced' for me at this time, but found a new friend in that exercise. 

Just in case you are confused, #2 is #2 in my edition of 42 (Schirmer), as it is in this edition of 40: -

https://fiddlerman.com/wp-cont.....Violin.pdf

2 is hard for a beginner, as there is a fair amount of shifting in it (fingerings vary).

Don't play the wrong #3!

5 (in Eb) is probably the easiest, but I'd recommend starting on Wohlfahrt instead: -

https://fiddlerman.com/wp-cont.....1_1-30.pdf

https://fiddlerman.com/wp-cont....._30-60.pdf

Yeah, Schroeder must have been a bit of a nutter. Or, in putting the usual #5 first, maybe he had half an idea there. In fact he confirms in the intro what we can guess - that he has put them, in his opinion, in order of difficulty.

Don't write 42/3, as Singer's 42 (my Schirmer edition - 1894, 1923) disagrees with Schroeder's 42. You will have to write something like Schr/3. It may look busy in 16ths, but you can and should play it as slowly as you like to begin with.

Added: as to how many Etudes Kreutzer wrote, I was reading the Cambridge Companion to the Violin the other night and came across something interesting: originally there were only 40. Numbers 13 and 24 were added later by a French editor. And, confusingly, editions are sometimes called "40 Etudes" even when they contain 42.

Kreutzer wrote a sequel on positions and shifting called "Etudes des diverses positions et démanchés pour violon" but I can't find an opus number for it, nor does it seem to be in IMSLP.