Do you know of any "best practice" or "what works" vi tutorial for programmers?
I just ended up reading the vim manual a few times, over the years, picking up useful features on each iteration.
One thing that really made vim work for me as a perl IDE was starting to use tags, as explained here: http://www.vim.org/tips/tip.php?tip_id=94. Using the pltags script that ships with vim, you can jump around between modules to find your functions, methods, etc.
If you are a beginner, vimtutor would be a good way to start with. (Type vimtutor on your shell and get going).
And once you get hold of the basics of vim, you can look around web and figure out things for yourself.