I have been programming in Perl since 1997. It is great general purpose language that has served me well over the years for building tools, quick hacks, and process automation and code generation software.
Perl is the language that put regular expressions on the map. Perl 5 is the standard for regular expressions adopted by most other languages.
If you already have a background in programming, Perl is an excellent language to learn. It is one of the few languages that allows you to code practical useful things early in your learning curve.
I made the course materials open source as well. I also have included the source documents here as well. You are free to reuse the materials as you see fit within the confines of the licensing agreement (which is pretty open and flexible).
