I try to read *some* quality code *really closely*. That is, I force myself to really read it (which I find annoyingly hard at times).

Quality code in Perl is available in masses on CPAN (as dws noted). That aside, I often like to read code in books (as opposed to reading on the screen) to alleviate writers block. The last really good one in Perl was "Network Programming with Perl" from Lincoln Stein. Other gems include Jon Bentley's "Programming Pearls", "Software Tools" by Kernighan and Plauger, "The Standard C Library" by Plauger, "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" and "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp" by Norvig, "Introduction to Algorithms" by Cormen et al., "Lion's Commentary on UNIX with Source Code" by Lions & Ritchie.

But still I have to say that the most inspirating thing is close contact to like-minded fellow programmers *in person*. And alas, this seems to be hard to get.

Ah, yes, recently I started to play with running perl under a debugger (single-stepping perl). That can be an awful lot of fun, too.

Christian Lemburg
Brainbench MVP for Perl
http://www.brainbench.com