Programming Perl

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Programming Perl book cover

Programming Perl, ISBN 0-596-00027-8, best known as the Camel Book among programmers, is a book about writing programs using the Perl programming language. Written by the creator of Perl, Larry Wall, and published by O'Reilly, the book is considered the canonical reference work for Perl programmers. With over a thousand pages, it contains a complete description of the Perl language and its interpreter. Examples range from trivial code snippets to the highly complex expressions for which Perl is notorious. The camel book is also noted for being written in an approachable and humorous style.

The first edition, which would eventually gain the nickname "the pink camel" due to its pink spine, was originally published in January 1991. This first edition, covering version 4 of the Perl language, was the work of two authors: Larry Wall and Randal L. Schwartz. By the time the second edition of the book was published in August 1996, Perl had changed significantly: it now included references, objects, packages and other modern programming constructs. In response to these changes, the two original authors, joined by Tom Christiansen, rewrote the book from scratch. In July 2000, the third and (as of 2007) most recent edition of Programming Perl was published. This version was again rewritten, this time by Wall, Christiansen and Jon Orwant, and covered the Perl 5.6 language.

Programming Perl has also been made available electronically by O'Reilly, both through its inclusion in various editions of The Perl CD Bookshelf and through the "Safari" service (a subscription-based website containing technical ebooks). The publisher offers online a free sample of Chapter Eighteen [1] as well as the complete set of code examples in the book [2].

Some related books are Learning Perl and Advanced Perl Programming.