The Perl community was too unfocused on the web. Perl was, and is, a general-purpose language built as a replacement for sed, awk, and shell scripts and later retrofitted for the web. PHP was built for one task, which gives it a certain coherency that is a major strength, especially for newbs.

You learn to build a web page with embedded PHP on page three of most tutorials. I don't remember the Camel book covering that at all. If it does I didn't notice -- too busy slogging through the regexps and the hash syntax and the insane special characters and the bizarre function-declaration syntax. And I fear that, in Perl, there is no standard way to do it. There are probably 75 standards, which is helpful, but not very helpful.

If I visit any random web forum about PHP I am 97% likely to find a discussion of website development; if I visit a random Perl forum I'm just as likely to find sysadmins debating how to automate database backups, or a linguistics debate, or a game of Perl golf.