I use the PDK on a very regular basis, courtesy of my employer. I like it and haven't found any major problems with it. With ActiveState, the modules tend to be a lot out of date (Old_Gray_Bear, I'd say months is the norm), but they are stable. If you truly need some update from CPAN, it's easy enough to get it and install it (I've recently had to get the latest Archive::Zip).

However, unless you need one of the features like perlapp, perlsvc, or perltray, I'm not sure it would be worth the price. You can get the ActiveState distribution for free, along with gvim (or your choice of several other free editors), so why spend the $195?

If you're writing programs to run on his webserver (or from only a couple machines you can install Perl on), there really isn't much gained from the PDK. On the other hand, if you (like me) want to have a process running constantly in the background of a windows machine, perlsvc is great. If you want to write some little patch that you'll distribute to a large population of non-computer people, perlapp is great for this. I also use perlapp when I need to do something on all of my users' databases (1000+) w/o them knowing the DBA password. It's not truly secure, but it's obfuscated enough after compiling it that none of them will discover it.

Ultimately, I'd recommend that you download and install it with the 21-day evaluation license and see if it has something you want. It won't cost you anything more than your time. Now if we can only convince Adobe to offer 21-day trial versions of its software. . . :^)

- - arden.
just my thoughts