An idea has occurred to me: What about something like a scavenger hunt? It would involve downloading a set of files to the hard drive, to include a readme to get you started. The first thing you'd do is write a script according to the beginning set of instructions. Those instructions might direct you to, for instance, grab text from a set of text files and assemble them into your next set of instructions. That, in turn, might direct you to write an FTP program designed to get data from a specific directory on a given server, which would be the next set of instructions. That, then, might direct you to write a script that puts together an HTML file that draws data from a database accessible on the Web. Et cetera. It has the benefits of A) not requiring one to be particularly interested in hack-n-slash adventure games, B) providing quick, positive feedback, and C) providing tasks of increasing difficulty as one progresses, to match the learning curve. There are probably other benefits as well, such as the fact that there aren't any "right" and "wrong" answers to the exercises, per se — only "effective" and "ineffective", which allows for a great deal of flexibility and ingenuity on the part of the student of Perl.

By the way, Snow Crash was an incredible read. It's all the Stephenson I've read so far, aside from a very long essay (more than 30k words, I think). I intend to read more of it in the future, thought.