I needed to build a personal tutoring website, with separate public and personal student sections... I found a couple of free plugins, which promised category protection... and indeed they do, but in a very crude way. At the end of the day I removed them, because while they worked, the resulting behavior was very rudimentary and made the site appear unprofessional.
This plugin looked a lot more promising, so I decided to give it a try... and indeed, it is a powerful and clever tool, that gives professional results. Typing a password leads the user to his personal section, and for admin, maintaining multiple personal sections is a breeze. Search shows only the results from the applicable categories (public and the user's personal section), and the integration of a login function is a piece of cake.
I found a slight issue with the calendar widget (posts by date), where the links on the calendar dates are not filtered out by the category, so clicking on some date may lead to a 'page not found', due to that page being in a different user's personal section. I don't see it as a big deal. In general, I'm quite happy with this plugin, and find it very useful.