Anybody who says "yes" or "no" without further clarification is giving you a lazy answer.

Penguin problems can result from links on crap sites or links from great sites.   If you place lots of links with optimized anchor text on a lot of great websites you could still have problems.  Google knows by that artificial anchor text that you are trying to manipulate.

So, it is not only WHERE the links are placed but HOW the links are anchored that is important.

Honestly, the best way to get links is by publishing great content.  If you can do that the links will arrive naturally with zero work from you.   I do almost zero link building.  The anchor text for most of my links is a domain name or a URL or simple words like "here" or "this website" or "this article".

should i, from google's perspective?

I can say that internal links can improve rankings and they can transfer small amounts of anchor text value to the target page (or at least that was the case the last time I experimented about  a year ago - who knows what google did yesterday or will do tomorrow).

So, based upon that, if I write an article that has a relevant connection to a product on my site I will make an anchor text link to the product page.

This should be helpful to visitors.  If you are talking about a widget twister in an article the person reading might want to look at one for informational reasons... or they might want to buy one.  Either way, that link helped the visitor.

you're saying that an internal link within a blog post is good, correct?

This is what I do.  I believe that it is helpful for SEO and helpful to visitors.

I have lots of articles on a blog and every one of them links to a product page whenever that product is mentioned in the article.  (I only link once to that page in each blog post - the first time that the product is mentioned or the mention where I think the reader's interest to view or purchase might be highest.

is there a guideline as to maybe how many links i should put per post?

I have never heard about any "guideline".  I can only say what I do.

One of my post could have links to one, five, ten or twenty products.  Most have three to five.

If those products are mentioned naturally in the post then I link them.  I am not trying to stuff products into posts, just whatever natural writing creates.