Most Perl web development was done with Lincoln Stein's CGI.pm in the late 90s. HTML::Mason was Perl's answer to PHP but it relied on mod_perl which most hostin

Most Perl web development was done with Lincoln Stein's CGI.pm in the late 90s. HTML::Mason was Perl's answer to PHP but it relied on mod_perl which most hosting companies were not prepared to let you have on the cheap. You could do CGI.pm procedural style or OO style with $obj->method() calls similar to PHP. "MySQL and Perl for the Web" by Dubois was a pretty good web primer at the time based on CGI.pm. This and "Programming Perl" got me started after I became intrigued by regular expressions which led to a deep interest in Perl. It's easy to forget that Perl was VERY cool back in the early 2000s. Reading "Programming Perl" for me was like reading great literature. Larry Wall the linguist really comes through strongly in the book.