I've now owned the Win32PRK for about 3 months.
Initially I was quite ecstatic about the pkg.
It was nice to have all the documentation on a
single CD, rather than having to download things,
and it was nice to have things like the visual
debugger, and the visual package manager. So, as
a perl novice, I was pleased.
That said, today I doubt I use ANY piece of the package at all!
And that's been the case for about 2 months now.
Doing the math, the PRK was useful for about 1
month, and that was it. I started finding that
the bugs with VPM and VDebuger and the major
errors in the documentation were more irritating
than I would originally admit. Further, I was
laboring under the "it's from oreilly so it MUST
be good" syndrome.
I would complain louder and more ferociously, but
I've reconciled myself with the thought that the
$120 that I spent will hopefully go towards
ActiveState's future development plans.
To anyone who plans on purchasing the PRK now -
DON'T!!! Just wait until the next stable release,
which, hopefully, will be more true to the
oreilly tradition. It's more worthwhile to spend
the $120 on the following:
Perl Interactive Tutorial - $40
Perl Cookbook - $32
Effective Perl Programming - $27
(Amazon prices)
And you'll end up with $20 to spare! There is
little, if any, convenience to the PRK (at least
in my experience). :((