You're right. One more point to be made (as someone who worked through all the exercises in Learning Perl and found it really helpful) is that it does not adequately handle the topics of data structures and object orientation. Familiarize your student with Perl's data structures fast or he will be yet-another-bad-perl-hack.
My favorite for learning data structures in perl is "Mastering Algorithms with Perl" from O'Reilly. Since the data structures are critical to the algorithms, the book takes some time to build them logically. Highly recommended.