First, thanks for taking on this subject. Working on Vanilla Perl has been an interesting lesson on just how many common Perl modules weren't written for portability. However, the meditation focuses a lot on Windows, so I'd either consider broadening the OSes covered or else changing the title.

That said, I found version 0 of the tutorial to be substantially less informative than perlport. If you're looking for a gentler introduction, I'd suggest taking perlport as the base and then translating it into something that is easier for a less experienced programmer to understand. There's a lot more to portability that what you've covered above.

I suggest you look at win32.perl.org -- there's a good deal of information there that will be of use. Search for "Problem Modules" and you can see a large variety of real-world portability problems in CPAN modules, some of which have been fixed and many of which have not.

Some other random thoughts that occurred to me in reading the tutorial:

• Mention perlport at the beginning, not the end.
• forking and signals
• line endings
• Making sure File::Spec is up to date -- lots of bug fixes since the last core release.
• Modules I've found helpful: IPC::Run3, File::HomeDir, ExtUtils::Command, Probe::Perl

All that said, I look forward to the next version.