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BOOK

Camel book

Type: book
  • The "Camel Book," officially titled "Programming Perl," is the definitive guide to the Perl programming language, co-authored by Larry Wall and me.

  • The Story of the First Edition

  • The collaboration on the first edition began with a post I made to the Perl mailing list. I knew the new features of Perl 3 and offered to help Larry Wall create some online documentation.
  • This offer led to a private email conversation with Larry. During our discussion, "Ambar" from O'Reilly & Associates suggested that the project should be a published book rather than just online documentation.
  • Larry and I continued our collaboration via email. We eventually met in person for the first time when Larry was visiting a relative in Salem, Oregon, and I joined him for the visit. This meeting solidified our partnership and the work on the first edition of the Camel Book began in earnest.
  • For the distribution of autographed copies of the first edition, see TECHbooks and the First Camel Book Distribution.

  • Authoring & Typesetting Toolchain

    • 1st Edition (1991): Authored in troff using custom macros that Randal had originally created at Tektronix (layered over ms macros with A-head, B-head, and C-head rubrics). Steve Talbott had brought them to Tim O'Reilly for the X books, and O'Reilly adopted them as their in-house standard. See Camel Book troff Macros.
    • 2nd Edition (1996) and Beyond: Migrated away from troff into extended-POD, which allowed easier collaborative authoring and online formatting.

What links here

🔗AI-Generated Obituary Grins 🔗 Aphantasia, Auditory Architecture, and Books Without Pictures 🔗Camel Book troff Macros 🔗James Deibele 🔗 Japanese Camel Book Translation Puns 🔗Larry Wall 🔗 Meeting Leo Laporte at the InGenius Bar 🔗Perl 🔗 Publication of the Camel Book 🔗Stonehenge courses 🔗TECHbooks 🔗 TECHbooks and the First Camel Book Distribution 🔗The Forrest Gump of Tech 🔗Tom Christiansen 🔗Wikipedia Notability Debate
These facts are as Randal recalls them, but much time has passed for most of this. If you find a factual error, please email realmerlyn@gmail.com.