Check out the tables of contents for my books. Both Learning Perl and Intermediate Perl are designed to teach programmers the Perl language. We cover the 80% of Perl that most people use all of the time and developed that from years and years of teaching people Perl. Each book is designed as a tutorial, and there are exercises at the end of each chapter. I've also written the Learning Perl Student Workbook to provide additional exercises. Programming Perl is a good reference, too.
There are actually very few rules that you need to know to "get" Perl, and most people don't get these rules right just by looking at code. Some things to teach new Perlers who are coming from another language:
- strict and warnings
- Scalar versus list context
- dynamic versus lexical scope
- The sigil is not the variable type
- List creation and manipulation (map, grep, sort)
- How to use CPAN effectively
- Closures and subroutines as data
- Recursion in Perl sucks
Good luck :)
