Hi, I've just acquired a nice shiny new CompSci student, with about a years experience. His course uses Java and Visual Basic as exemplars of programming languages. He has also taught himself a fair bit of Oracle. He's clearly bright and well-motivated.He's coming to us for a year's work placement.

We need some database organisation (we'll use MySQL), and some simple web interfaces to same. We'll run all of this on Apache on Linux (what else!). All going well we'll set up a simple web portal built on Slashcode or Everything in the future.

So - to the question - I need advice on how to teach this guy. I know Perl fairly well, but my own background is in clinial medicine, not programming. Our student is doing this to boost his CV and gain experience. I have a responsibility to him, more than I would have, say, if I could afford to hire some of you lot.

Some obvious resources are here, 'Learning Perl', various other O'Reilly books, and some of the New Riders books on MySql. These I have. I plan to turn him loose with Learning Perl, and make him work through the exercises. Any more specific suggestions for bringing people from a Java/VB background to a working knowledge of Perl fairly quickly?