Listened to a good podcast on techniques reading other's code.
Reminds of my last project of adding a feature to a partner company's C code with lots of dependencies on libraries tied to the OS (Linux), no tests, no debugger working, and no documentation :).
Key take-aways for me from the podcast:
1. Start small and look at 5-20K lines of code for practice (e.g., open source projects).
2. Know the environment (e.g., read the source code of the Ruby interpreter if you're programming Ruby). Beware of evil wizards (e.g., understand the code generated by IDE wizards).
3. Use version control to modify the code you're reading to play around with it. Use VM for playing with code that's tied to the OS (like the project I had).
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