Editions have been co-written by the creator of Perl, Larry Wall, along with Randal L. Schwartz, then Tom Christiansen and then Jon Orwant.

Published by O'Reilly Media, the book is considered the canonical reference work for Perl programmers.

Examples range from trivial code snippets to the highly complex expressions for which Perl is widely known.

The second edition, published in August 1996, included updates for the release of Perl 5, among them references, objects, packages and other modern programming constructs.

This version was again rewritten, this time by Wall, Christiansen and Jon Orwant, and covered the Perl 5.6 language.