there are five steps to becomming a better codder

A programmer friend of mine use to always tell me how his memorization of over 200 function in C++ helped him greatly. " I never have too look up a function definitions , therefore I can code 50% faster then the average coder" he would tell me. So what happened? Intellisense for one, two when C# came out all his diligence in memorizing functions went to waste as he had to learned a new language. Of course in coding some memorization is a necessity but you should spend more time learning the method of doing things, IE creating a db connection, consuming a RSS feed, etc. etc then memorizing how to do them. Learn the correct methods of doing thing, don't memorize.
Tip 2. Create your own Resource library

We all have a block of code that for some reason or another we have to look up. I can never remember the exact sequence of code to connect to a database. So every time I had to do this I would spend 10 minutes finding the book, looking up the link, etc. To combat this I created a word document that has snippets of code that I have trouble remembering for some reason or another. One of my colleagues creates a bookmarks of links, another stores all his in a email. What ever your method is its a good habit to keep that file close by . The point is that you should be building you knowledge base and you will find that it will greatly help you in coding better and faster.