[Wine] Re: How should I educate myself in order to code for WineHQ?

[vitamin]

Again, what do you want to accomplish? The open source projects are not something you have to participate in to check a checkbox in your life accomplishments :-) It's something that you like doing, unless you are being paid to do something in particular.

In any event. If you want to learn programming - then you have to start form learning the programming language, regardless where you want to use it. This is what this book is really good for:

jingo811 wrote:
> 1.) K & R book.
> Read "The C Programming Language" and do all the excercises.
> 


Of course doing "home work" from that book is all well and good, but it's more fun to actually use it for something... like Wine. For that you'll need to know the API (what functions to call at least). However, the API is not something you just read like a book. You just need to have an API reference (http://msdn.microsoft.com) handy.

However you will need some basic concepts of how things work. That's where this one comes in:

jingo811 wrote:
> 2.) Read the Win API tutorial.
> http://winprog.org/tutorial/start.html
> 


When you get all excited and want to actually do something with Wine you'll need to know at least where what files are, how to compile Wine and how to debug it. You can find that info here:

jingo811 wrote:
> 
> 3.) Wine Developer's Guide
> Read and fully understand this 14 chapter guide before going to the next step?
> http://winehq.org/site/docs/winedev-guide/index
> 


And when you get to a point of sending patch, that's how you do it:

jingo811 wrote:
> 
> 4.) Subscribe to <wine-patches at winehq.org>
> 


If you need some simple projects to start with you can find one list of them here. Most don't require too much of API knowledge. Some don't even need programming experiance. Of course you do need to understand plain C.

jingo811 wrote:
> 
> 5.) Is it time to code now? (Janitorial)
> http://wiki.winehq.org/JanitorialProjects
> 


You don't have to do this one after the other. Most you can do in parallel. Or even backwards if you so desire. Just please don't ask people to teach you C. That's what the step #1 is for. And most people won't tell you exactly what each function does.