I think that when a book or a webpage just says "this is how you do
foo" and always follows that format, you don't learn as much as you are
when you look at an example and go "How does that work?" or sometimes
"Why doesn't that work like I expected?"

I have found, and I am guilty of this too, that when the code is laid out word for word, it
encourages cut-and-paste coding, and you don't learn from it.

An example of this would be the number of bad javascripts that are out
there because someone went to the 20 or so webpages that just let you
copy code and pasted it without really knowing how it all tied together
or what was needed to make it work like they want it to.

That all said, the Code Catacombs and CUFP are both great nodes to look at for their examples
and what people have done with Perl.