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 for them 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.