Hello all, i've been a developer for the past couple of years and i would like to jump onto the blockchain coding paradigms, i've downloaded the first satoshi client's code (0.1) and there's this overview
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=41718.40 that i would like to follow but there's a couple of missing files (i presume) mainly, i can't find the init.cpp file,
It doesn't exist in 0.1.0. A lot of stuff has changed since then, and it really is not worth your time to read through the original source code. So much has changed that whatever you learn is not applicable to the latest source code. You should instead try to learn and understand Bitcoin Core's latest source code. Keep in mind that the project has grown significantly since 0.1.0 and is much more complex.
anyway, i would like to ask a couple of questions to any developer that delved into the code out there, first, does anyone out there know of a chatting room/forum for people like myself?
You can try the #bitcoin, #bitcoin-dev, and #bitcoin-core-dev channels on Freenode's IRC.
Also, does anyone know of any guides/overviews/write ups that explain any parts of the code of any version of the bitcoin client? or is there any other altcoins that are similar to follow but a little easier? Any books that helped you go through the code?
I don't know of any recent ones that are accurate. But it isn't all that hard to follow the code. It is fairly well commented and the names of things are self explanatory. You can start with src/bitcoind.cpp where the main function is for bitcoind and then follow along from there. Knowing how to use grep to find things is also very useful.
and what cryptography knowledge books did you make use of?
Bitcoin does not actually use that much cryptography. You just need to understand some basics, like what a hash function is and what digital signatures are. That's about it.
