I received an email from O'Reilly promoting this course a few days ago. Ironically, I saw Merlyn's post right after reading through the email and checking out the course.

I took a Perl/CGI course from O'Reilly last spring and it was... Okay. The material was a little dated. I'm sure this is a better course but as much as I've benefited from a few of these online/video courses in the past, I haven't had the same results when it comes to learning Perl. As boring as it may sound, I'd like a course where you get to watch the teacher writing code as they explain what the code is doing. The closest I've found to that was on Lynda.com, taught by Bill Weinman (Lynda.com is more targeted towards creative professionals but has quite a few programming courses).

As to online certification — I'm biased because my wife is a college professor but I think an aspiring Perl programmer is better off going to night classes (even at a community college if money's the issue). Having my code work well is all the certification I need. :)

Edit: Misspelled "Merlyn" (pretty bad considering how many times I've read The Once And Future King including as part of an Arthurian Lit. class in college). Apologies to Randal and T.H. White.