The first edition (1993) was authored solely by Randal L. Schwartz, and covered Perl 4.

The fourth (2005), fifth (2008), sixth (2011), seventh (2016), and eighth (2021) editions were written by Schwartz, Phoenix, and brian d foy.

The publisher offers a complete set of code examples presented in the 3rd Edition book.

[3] Schwartz selected the world of The Flintstones for the examples in this book, giving rise to the somewhat frequent use of Fred and Barney as metasyntactic variables, rather than the classic foo and bar.

"[5] Discussing Schwartz' conviction, the New York Times noted that "Much of the Internet's World Wide Web has been built by programmers who got their start by reading his "Programming Perl" and "Learning Perl" books.