I paid for my subscription to ASPN Perl in October of last year and wasn’t completely sure if it was a good idea and I am sure others may wonder the same thing since it is a pay service unlike so many other things in the Perl community. I will attempt to explain what ASPN Perl is and how it may or may not be worth the expense to you.

What is ASPN

ASPN stands for ActiveState Programmer Network, there are various types and levels of ASPN, but I am discussing only the top rung of the ladder for Perl, which is ASPN Perl.

ASPN Perl gives you online books from O’Reilly, the Perl Developer Kit (PDK), Visual Perl, Komodo, and various online references such as newsgroups and mailing lists.

Cost

$495 at the time of this post

Summary

I think the easiest way to summarize ASPN is by listing how much value add different items have been for me.

Item	Value Add	Platforms	Comments
Komodo	***	Linux/Win32	This product is good, but it still has glitches.
Visual Perl	-	Win32	I haven’t used this because I don’t the Microsoft development environment to work with.
Books	*****	Web Interface All	O’Reilly Perl books, do I need to say more?
PDK	****	Primarily focused at windows, but the PerlApp tool is available for the Linux platform	The value add on the PDK is really dependent on whether you need to create executables or standalone apps.
Mailing lists Newsgroups	*	Web Interface All	They are searchable and well grouped, but there are almost too many at a time and new users may be overwhelmed or not know where to start. These are also available to non members for the most part.

For me the purchase price paid for itself in a very short time. I used the PerlApp utility to complete some projects and the online reference material saved me the expense of buying new editions of the books or replacing worn out copies, not to mention the fact that they are searchable.

This review will hopefully be updated as new information and products come available and if you know of anything I missed please let me know.

Links
ActiveState
ASPN Perl Information
APSN Opening page all levels
Visual Perl
Komodo


Now if I can only get a budget for some of merlyn's classes I can review those too.

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