The main use of Perl in the Win32 environment is CGI programming and in this area the book does not have enough value for beginners. The adaptation attempt failed and the results are pretty disappointing. IMHO Cross platform Perl by Eric F. Johnson is a better deal. Neither the examples, nor style are very suitable to Win32. These recommendations can be considered a joke for Win32 beginners, who get used to prepackaged software.
Chapters are very uneven in length and quality.
Chapter 1 is disappointing. The secret word guesser introduced in Chapter 1 is definitely far from the best introductory example for Win32 audience. The number of unexplained concepts introduced here would scare novices away. Chapter 3 does not provide a clear description of Perl syntactical and semantical achievements and pitfalls. For example, Perl considers a negative subscript on the array as a count back from the end.