You are much better off investing your time in MSVC++. However for the reason
that you are already comfortable with C and some of what you want to do is low
level I would suggest you use the C programming language to write your Win32
apps and avoid the Microsoft Foundation Class.
You will learn a lot more if you use C to access the Win32 API. Gradually you
can pick up C++ and use MFC if you choose.
I would suggest that you start with Programming Windows 95, The Definitive
Developer's Guide to the Windows 95 API by Charles Petzold. Go read the
reviews at Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/157231995X/103-7738669-8912630
As far as Win32::GUI in Perl is concerned, do you really want to write
programs that only run on systems with perl.exe installed. perl2exe will turn
a 250K Windows program written in C into a 2M Windows executable written in
Perl. I have used perl2exe on numerous occassions and find that there are
times when the resultant executable fails in some regard, despite that same
perl code previously running perfectly with the perl interpreter.
You will also find that for the reason that Win32::GUI is a beta module you
will be required to create numerous work arounds to get what you want. Some
things like memory management and multi-threading are not possible. In
addition the documentation is sparce.
In short Win32::GUI is fun. It is in my opinion a better alternative to TK.
But it is no replacement for either C/Win32 API or C++/MFC in regard to
creating efficient robust effective Windows Applications.
I hope this helps.
- Bone Digger
