newbie question

[Pratyush Yadav]

Hi,

On Wed, 22 May 2019 at 09:44, Rodney W. Grimes
<freebsd-rwg at gndrsh.dnsmgr.net> wrote:
>
> > On Wednesday, 22 May 2019 at  1:36:24 +0300, Alexandru Goia wrote:
> > > greetings. how can do i get attuned in a logical manner with the
> > > *bsd/freebsd kernel source code ? thank you very much !
> >
> > Clearly you know how to get it (otherwise
> > https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ is your
> > friend).  To understand it better, I'd suggest reading "The Design and
> > Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System" by Kirk McKusick and
> > George Neville-Neil (Addison-Wesley).
> >
> > Understanding the code requires some work.  People will happily answer
> > detail questions, but you'll be responsible for finding out the
> > overall structure yourself.
>
> During a somewhat recent session of working with a not new,
> but also not seasoned developer, they noted a great deal of
> confusion when I was reading through and explaining code
> to them when I would actually read "pcb" on screen as
> "Process Control Block" when verbalizing it.  They could not
> see what I had just read to them.
>
> After a short discussion we realized that my mind was auto translating
> the short and cryptic variable names into the full and proper names.
> This became key in my understanding of how all these bits work
> long long ago and has just become automatic.

That's actually great insight. After reading your message I noticed I
do the same when working.

> [snip]

Apart from this, I think usually actually fixing some bug or
implementing some feature improves my understanding of a codebase and
a community. Fixing a bug is a good motivator for understanding a
subsystem.

-- 
Regards,
Pratyush Yadav