Learning to program was always easy and pure fun to me.
However, I would certainly be better if perlmonks would have existed this time, and I would have read more source code of others this way.
Be it perl or anything else.

There's a question of me:
What makes you a good programmer ?

• No bugs ?
• Code easy to read ?
• Small memory print ?
• Fast code ?
• Programming fast ?
• Code Easy to maintain ?
• Well written documentation ?
• Reusable sources ?

There should be more possiblities, but even the questions above are contradicting.

I personally try to write as much reusable code as I can,
I believe this way you cover most of the points above.