Learning Perl, 5th Edition

History of This Book

For the curious, here’s how Randal tells the story of how this book came about:

After I had finished the first Programming Perl book with Larry Wall (in 1991), I was approached by Taos Mountain Software in Silicon Valley to produce a training course. This included having me deliver the first dozen or so courses and train their staff to continue offering the course. I wrote the course for them^[1] and delivered it as promised.

On the third or fourth delivery of that course (in late 1991), someone came up to me and said, “You know, I really like Programming Perl, but the way the material is presented in this course is so much easier to follow—you oughta write a book like this course.” It sounded like an opportunity to me, so I started thinking about it.

I wrote to Tim O’Reilly with a proposal based on an outline that was similar to the course I was presenting for Taos—although I had rearranged and modified a few of the chapters based on observations in the classroom. I think that was my fastest proposal acceptance in history—I got a message from Tim within 15 minutes saying, “We’ve been waiting for you to pitch a second book—Programming Perl is selling like gangbusters.” That started the effort over the next 18 months to finish the first edition of Learning Perl.

During that time, I was starting to see an opportunity to teach Perl classes outside Silicon Valley,^[†] so I created a class based on the text I was writing for Learning Perl. I gave a dozen classes for various ...