getting started on big opensource projects

[ritka]

hi everybody,
i have been coding for quite a long time just for my own fun and purpose and now thought about to get started on real projects. so i downloaded some sourcecode of different interesting opensource projects and looked at it just to see wether i could modify something or add features that came to my mind. but the sources are usually quite large. there are so many hader files and classes. so it was realy hard/impossible for me to keep track of all these things and to understand, how the program actualy works.
so i'd like to know, how to read the source and how i can find out the interesting parts of the program. how do you handle these things, if you do?
thanks for all answers,
ritka

[kbw]

The trick is to try to understand the architecture. If you can't figure out how it works, it'll forever seem like a basket of unrelated modules.

http://www.aosabook.org/en/index.html

[ritka]

yes, you're right. it looks like this :)
the link looks good. i didn't thought there could be a whole book about this topic, but i will have a look at this. thx.