Reading List for Getting Up to Speed

I've started to familiarize myself with the source code and build tools. I'll be posting regular status updates on my blog (linked below) for others to follow getting started with bitcoin development.

http://hewo.xedoloh.com/bitcoin-dev/

A tally from August indicated that I may need to slog through 280,000 lines of code to get up to speed. I sampled https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/key.cpp and skimmed it in about 5 minutes, putting me at 2600 lines per hour. At that rate, I would need to devote 110 hours to read the entire code base.

With that time investment I could get a fair amount of testing done, so I'm curious if we have a map of the most important areas to study for new developers and automated test writers.

Thanks for your time,

Will Bickford "In Google We Trust"

On Wed, Dec 24, 2014 at 5:08 PM, Will Bickford <wbic16@gmail•com> wrote:

> A tally from August indicated that I may need to slog through 280,000 lines

You're counting 170kloc of machine generated code with the translation strings there.

The top level (/src) and libconsensus are only about 36kloc. This is small enough that I would strongly recommend at least skimming all of it.

Gotcha. That's much more manageable. Thanks!

Will Bickford "In Google We Trust"

On Wed, Dec 24, 2014 at 1:44 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail•com> wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 24, 2014 at 5:08 PM, Will Bickford <wbic16@gmail•com> wrote:
> > A tally from August indicated that I may need to slog through 280,000
> lines
>
> You're counting 170kloc of machine generated code with the translation
> strings there.
>
> The top level (/src) and libconsensus are only about 36kloc. This is
> small enough that I would strongly recommend at least skimming all of
> it.
>