[nandemo]

I believe "read good code" is already standard advice for improving your coding skills. However, I think there are many differences compared to studying chess by analysing games.

One way that it works for programming is doing small exercises and then checking the answers. For instance, the 99 Problems in Prolog (or its translations to Lisp, Haskell, etc):

http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~meidanis/courses/mc336/2006s2/func...

But as you say, for larger problems it's harder to find good "answers". Even for something relatively small like unix utilities. Say you want to write cat or echo. You get source code from BSD and GNU and Solaris and they're quite different from each other (I recall seeing a comparison somewhere, mainly putting the GNU code in bad light, perhaps unfairly. Anyone has the link?).