Learning Pathway?

[hayek]

I am very poor at taking an open source project and digging in to figure it out. It's my personality to need guidance/mentoring when I step in to a new domain.

I'm curious of what paths you took when you starting working/looking at code that revolved around bitcoin. Where did you start, what helped, what hurt?

[joshlang]

I made a C# node.

I started out virtually living here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_specification

Then expand from there.  It was the way I learned - the documentation is kinda hellish, but it's pretty good all in all, and should get you going.

[jackjack]

Asking people + protocol specification page

[MatthewLM]

Check out this wiki page for all of the technical things: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Category:Technical

Also people may be able to help you on this forum as well as #bitcoin-dev on freenode.

Though ultimately it is best to look through the code. Unfortunately the satoshi client is quite difficult to follow. Getting a basic understanding before you do that is a good idea I think.

I also looked a little bit at bitcoinj but couldn't get far because it was very incomplete at the time I first looked. It appears to be much more complete now. There are other libraries you can look at.

[jackjack]

Though ultimately it is best to look through the code. Unfortunately the satoshi client is quite difficult to follow. Getting a basic understanding before you do that is a good idea I think.

+1
I started with Joric's pywallet, it's a wonderful piece of software to understand how some things work