Kudos for this angiehope...I have dealt with folks coming to Perl from different disciplines. Some exhibit influences of the languages they already use and others are yet to develop thinking along lines of computer programmers. The educational programs are as just varied as the student base they're directed at, this is true for someone who're not self-educating and hence, the types and levels of homeworks may be different since some of these programs go so deep in Perl while others are just skimming through operators and basic Perl stuff. The guidelines you provided unify all these aspects under a general umbrella so tactfully.

Excellent work indeed specially the bit when you spoke about version control, that is an important concept. However, you've limited the scope of the guidelines to only Unix/Linux when you spoke about the editors out there. There are many editors that have simultaneous support for many languages across different platforms and a student maybe using such an editor already in writing another language. So you can suggest that a student may check whether their editor has support for Perl syntax or not

What a novice learning Perl should focus more on is writing correct syntax and following good coding practices, when I am training folks on Perl I get them to use plain notepads first of all to get them familiar with understanding the syntax errors and warnings generated and then acting upon these errors rather than depending on some syntax highlighting features that may distract attentions (for instance, some excellent editor that I use doesn't highlight non-core module names for these modules installed not through PPM or CPAN)

use Data::Dumper;: print Dumper [your Perl variable]

or a [reference to your Perl variable]. Consider the following:

use Data::Dumper;
my @dim_array = ([qw(1 2 3)],[qw(3 2 1)]);
print Dumper(\@dim_array);
print "\n";
print Dumper(@dim_array);
[download]

for example the BioPerl module used to process gene data

BioPerl is a collection of many modules that parse a lot of data related to biology and bioinformatics

Finally, emphasis on documenting code properly through exercising oneself in the practice is another point worthy of mentioning, after all, we learn Perl to write code that may be supported by someone else and documenting such code may make maintaining it a lot more easier..