I have been reading the R base library code, mainly to understand the graphics functions. I'm amazed how simple and ordinary it looks. I have never worked on a

I have been reading the R base library code, mainly to understand the graphics functions. I'm amazed how simple and ordinary it looks. I have never worked on a big software project and it's exciting for me to see how something powerful is built from small chunks here and there. Last year I spent some time reading the arc source code. It was a lot of fun. I didn't know any Lisp, so the recursions and macros were hard for me to get my head around, but it was amazing to realise that this site is built on some small core concepts which can be grokked if you spare the time. I loved Douglas Crockford's book Javascript: The Good Parts. Again, I couldn't understand all of it but it gave me a good feel for well-written Javascript code.