^^ above me is right, what I usually do to test my own network, cracks my WPA password in 8 seconds and its like 30 something letters long. is I use backtrack but type in airmon-ng start wlan0 and then airodump-ng mon0 to scan for a network and then I find a network and use the BSSID in reaver.. like this
reaver -i mon0 -b (bssid here) -vv and it usually cracks it. basically the simple usage for reaver, I think its a great tool.