[jasongill]

I just had to check if it even existed because I was sure that I had a CGI book that focused on Perl from O'Reilly in the late 90's, and sure enough, the book I had was published in 1996 (with a second edition released in 2000).

Not saying your anecdote is inaccurate, but my perception around that time was that "Learn PHP in 24 Hours" was a lot hotter than O'Reilly's Perl books - so it may have just been luck, marketing, a flashier title, or even just that PHP was better suited for what people wanted to learn and do.

[lubujackson]

Slapping PHP tags inside an HTML file was a more natural "outside-in" sort of introduction to programming for the web than Perl's approach. If you already knew some HTML and wanted to add a widget to a page, PHP made that dead simple.

[bornfreddy]

Also, you could just FTP the files to the hosted server and it would magically work. No other language that I know of allowed that at the time.

[timeon]

It seems to be lost art now. Running it locally however was different story.

[jbullock35]

Yes, that's what I had in mind. 1996 was still early—but perhaps the delay allowed PHP to get more of a foothold than it would otherwise have had, especially at such an early stage in the web's development.