Programming Perl (coauthored by #22483 - good work Randal, i've had mine for near on 10 years) was a great intro to Perl. Starting with regex, slicing and dicing arrays, associative arrays etc. Plus the whys and hows of reporting in Perl and a function reference.
I'm not sure how much it's changed in it's third edition but i would base a course on it and use it as the text book. It's reasonably terse and to the point. Plus then your course matches your documentation.
