Building a module yourself is definitely not the right approach with Active State Perl. Trying to do so, can lead to lots of pain and grief.

The best way with Active State Perl is to use their ppm utility to install modules. Type ppm at the command prompt for the gui version, type ppm help to get help for the command line version. The modules are pre-built and "ready to go" for your platform. If any dependencies are required, ppm will install them.

The gui version of ppm is easier to use for most simple situations. The command line version has additional functionality but is harder to use.

Note that not all modules are contained in the main Active State repository. There are other repositories and ppm knows about them. Under Edit|preferences there is a way to add more repositories,. This of course slows the tool down a lot, but look real hard before trying to build a module yourself. Often if none of the well known repositories has the .ppd file for a module, that means that there is some problem getting it to work on Win32 systems. And if that is the case you just became a porter and will be spending a lot of time.

For IO-Socket-SSL, it is available via ppm. I just installed it and it needed Net-SSLeay on my machine which ppm automatically installed for me. This process was very easy and is definitely the way to go!