Perl was extremely popular 20+ years ago in biology; I made the jump from the lab bench to bioinformatics with Perl and Bioperl (https://bioperl.org/).
But, after a while I discovered Ruby, and later Python, and moved on, also switching to other fields.
The presence of Perl and a "proper" terminal on Mac OS X back then was a big draw in encouraging bioinformaticians to use it (well, that is my recollection, anyway).
That first was a good book - there's still a copy on my shelf in the office, I think, though I've not had chance to go there in person to check recently.
