Part of me wanted to keep the order with the "traditional recipe" first, because that's the order presented in the original A Guide to Installing Modules. But since I agree that using cpan or alternative clients is preferred, I followed your advice and changed the order.

For the cpan configuration and usage suggestions: are those really Win32-useful enough that they belong here? Or are they just generically useful? Do others think that this tutorial should include that suggested extra detail about the CPAN shell? or even more than that? What about extra hints for the other clients?

Wiki syntax: I often forget to put that space after the end-single-quote. I had actually noticed that on another instance, and thought I had converted all of my wiki syntax to plain Perl Monks Approved HTML tags, but I missed those. Thanks