On the topic of teaching programming using Perl, you might look at the book by danger (Andrew Johnson) Elements of Programming with Perl. It's a well written book that teaches programming using Perl instead of BASIC or some other low level language.
Wholly cow. I've been thinking "It'd be nice if there was an instructional text for beginning programming that used Perl instead of C++, Basic, Visual Basic, Pascal, or Logo!" for months. Now I find out it exists. I'm glad I stumbled across this.