To use ReSpec, you will need to have the following software packages installed:

1) Perl - this should already be installed on most operating systems. For
   Windows you can get it from http://activestate.com/.

2) libxml2 - this should come pre-installed on Mac OS X and most Linux
   systems, for Windows and other platforms you can get it from
   http://xmlsoft.org/.

3) the following three Perl modules:
    XML::LibXML
    XML::LibXML::XPathContext
    XML::LibXSLT
   These can be installed in several ways:
     - use pre-packaged binaries for your OS (RPM, Deb, etc.)
     - download them from the CPAN (http://search.cpan.org/), and
       follow their installation instructions
     - use the CPAN shell. It can be run from the command line with
       the following command: "perl -MCPAN -e shell". If you have
       never used it before, it will prompt you for some configuration
       information. This is a short process, and most of the information
       should be obvious (for anything you don't understand, accept the
       default). The one setting that you likely most want to change is
       to tell it to automatically follow dependencies instead of 
       prompting as this greatly eases the process of installing new
       dependencies. Once that is done, type 
       "install XML::LibXML::XPathContext" (which will install XML::LibXML
       as a dependency) and then "install XML::LibXSLT".
     - under Windows, using the PPM tool that comes with ActivePerl. Doing
       so is explained in the Perl-XML FAQ at:
          http://perl-xml.sourceforge.net/faq/

Then, you need to build and install ReSpec itself:

perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
# optional, as superuser:
make install

Now you should be able to run it as 'respec my-spec-file.xml' and it
will generate xhtml output.

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR WINDOWS USERS:
---------------------------------

cygwin and ActivePerl do not work well together: ReSpec cannot be installed if you try
to use this combination. 
Use only nmake with ActivePerl / MS perl,or cygwin make with cygwin perl.

ReSpec 0.55 was successfully tested with nmake15 and ActivePerl5.8.8 on Windows XP Pro SP2. 

nmake can be downloaded from: 
http://download.microsoft.com/download/vc15/patch/1.52/w95/en-us/nmake15.exe

ActivePerl can be downloaded from:
http://www.activestate.com/store/languages/register.plex?id=ActivePerl