I agree with your choice for textbook to use in the class. I just picked up the O'Reilly Learning Perl book because I found it to be less intimidating than the main Perl reference manual. I'm not sure if you would want it in your class, but as an optional reference, you could also look into Perl for Dummies. If the students need a Perl interpreter, they can get the ActiveState interpreter and perl 5.6.1 with Perl for Dummies. They can also go get perl 5.6.1 as a package option when downloading Cygwin. I would also go along with the other suggestions for projects that the other Monks have left in response to your questions.
One suggestion I have for a project is to have the students write a script that extracts information out of a database or off a web page and formats it in a file with headers for either e-mailing or paging. Assume that another programmer has developed the software that will send the messages, and the students are to write the program that creates the message files with the extracted info. As an additional requirement, all message files are to be numbered to avoid overwriting of previous messages created. The students can use File::CounterFile, or write the file numbering routine themselves under the assumption that the program will not be shared on a network.