The first edition hit the streets on the first day of November 1993,
‡
and became a
smashing success, frequently even outpacing Programming perl book sales.
The back-cover jacket of the first book said “written by a leading Perl trainer.” Well,
that became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Within a few months, I was starting to get email
from all over the United States asking me to teach at their site. In the following seven
years, my company became the leading worldwide on-site Perl training company, and
I had personally racked up (literally) a million frequent-flier miles. It didn’t hurt that
the Web started taking off about then, and the webmasters and webmistresses picked
Perl as the language of choice for content management, interaction through CGI, and
maintenance.
For two years, I worked closely with Tom Phoenix in his role as lead trainer and content
manager for Stonehenge, giving him charter to experiment with the “Llama” course by
moving things around and breaking things up. When we had come up with what we
thought was the best major revision of the course, I contacted O’Reilly and said, “It’s
time for a new book!” And that became the third edition.
Two years after writing the third edition of the Llama, Tom and I decided it was time
to push our follow-on “advanced” course out into the world as a book, for people
writing programs that are “100 to 10,000 lines of code.” And together we created the
first Alpaca book, released in 2003.
But fellow instructor brian d foy was just getting back from the conflict in the Gulf, and
had noticed that we could use some rewriting in both books, because our courseware
still needed to track the changing needs of the typical student. So, he pitched the idea
to O’Reilly to take on rewriting both the Llama and the Alpaca one final time before
Perl 6 (we hope). This edition of the Llama reflects those changes. brian has really been
the lead writer here, working with my occasional guidance, and has done a brilliant job
of the usual “herding cats” that a multiple-writer team generally feels like.
On December 18, 2007, the Perl 5 Porters released Perl 5.10, a significant new version
of Perl with several new features. The previous version, 5.8, had focused on the un-
derpinnings of Perl and its Unicode support. The latest version, starting from the stable
5.8 foundation, was able to add completely new features, some of which it borrowed
from the development of Perl 6 (not yet released). Some of these features, such as named
captures in regular expressions, are much better than the old ways of doing things, thus
perfect for Perl beginners. We hadn’t thought about a fifth edition of this book, but
Perl 5.10 was so much better that we couldn’t resist.
Since then, Perl has been under constant improvement and is keeping a regular release
cycle. We didn’t have a chance to update this book for Perl 5.12 because development
proceeded too quickly. We’re pleased to offer this update for Perl 5.14, and are amazed
that there’s now a sixth edition.
‡ I remember that date very well, because it was also the day I was arrested at my home for computer-related-
activities around my Intel contract, a series of felony charges for which I was later convicted.
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