Open Source code reading/writing

Today was the first class of my BTP600 Design Patterns class. The teacher talked about how there are 3 ways to go about learning to write larger, non-trivial programs.

1. Try + Fail + Fix


2. Read the code of other (superstar) coders to see how they did it well


3. Design Patterns

I like this class. It's very hard to see how I will ever write something large and non-trivial but I know that's what we will accomplish by the end of BTS and this course as well. When I look at the mozilla code base, I can't see how something like this came to be. What do you write first?

The teacher mentioned that Kernighan (sp?) and Richie write really great code and so I'd like to read some. Anyone know of a good example? I welcome tips on code that you may have found exciting to read.