xorebxebx: I would rather say: ... there are plenty of bad examples out there.
The source code for the BSDs, the GNU Toolset, OS kernels, Windowing systems, Language sources, projects from Apache and so on are all openly available. Why would you look for bad code and do you know of closed source projects that are better than these? Pessimism accomplishes nothing, and doesn't help an enquiring mind.
Another thing to check out on this site if you haven't already is: http://www.cplusplus.com/src/
Look through few of these programs, make some tweaks and get them to do what you want. This way you get practice reading code and integrating your own changes into already written code. A lot of programmers end up inheriting/updating/patching/modifying existing code, so it helps to have some practice reading and interpreting other people's code.