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I was wondering how valuable open-source projects are to learn from?

I still consider myself "beginner" due moreso to lack of experience than lack of knowledge- I've read many C/C++ tutorials and taken classes and such, but I just really lack experience. Therefore, even though I understand the major data types and coding techniques, I don't have a solid grasp on what approach to take to use them in my own programming. Therefore, while I continue to read/practice/learn, I have been downloading lots of open-source code (random applications, emulators, games). It is worthwhile looking at them to help learn? I find it extremely interesting, but more often than not just get lost.

Second question, where does one usually start when doing this? Do you hunt down a main() function somewhere? Do you look at headers to see what functions will be available throughout the code and get an idea of what is around to work with?

Please let me know!

R

Russel
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I personally wouldn't recommend the reading of the source code of open-source projects to a beginner, especially if they're mature projects. It may be overwhelming for a beginner since they tend to be rather large projects with thousands of lines of code, most likely of a non-trivial design.

If you lack experience, then the best way to gain experience is by writing your own programs and taking on your own projects that are of interest to you, in my opinion. You can certainly read other people's code to see "how it's done", but actually trying to implement those ideas yourself in practice does more to help you understand how to write code than just passively reading code. In turn, the gained understanding and experience will allow you to make better sense of other people's code.

It's sort of like math; you may know the formulae, and you can see how mathematicians/teachers/professors/etc. use those formulae, but you won't really understand them until you try them out yourself. Once you do understand them, then the kinds of things mathematicians write will make much more sense.

In silico
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Try to focus on things you want to do, there's not a lot of point in looking at code for an application that you have no reference point for.

The best place to start would probably be to look at a project like Boost

But formulate a series of application tasks that you'd like to investigate, perhaps graphics, text editing or socket programming... and then work from there.

Getting a good IDE or programmers editor that will help you navigate the code is a major plus.

For example, Emacs + ECTAGS/CEDET/Semantic will help you browse all the functions / classes in a C / C++ project.

ocodo
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  • I wouldn't recommend reading the boost source code to a self described C++ beginner. It is littered with compiler workarounds that make some the code nearly impossible to understand. – Sam Miller Nov 12 '10 at 01:52
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I'm agree with @In silico. It's very useful to see other's code, but only when it's a little bit over your level, so that you can learn something. I've seen quite a few projects that were too "over-engineered", so that learning from them when you can't really tell the good from the bad will be a bad idea.

Another thing is to learn from another programmer, when you could ask why he did one way and not another. In this case the difference in levels does not matter.

So I'd suggest programming by yourself, and looking on the other people's code for the same thing after you've tried it. In this way you'll be able to compare the choices you've seen and the decision you've made with someone else (when you don't know a problem in depth, any suggested solution would seem right). You know, In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.

ruslik
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