> Modern software is so huge and complicated that it's not feasible to go read it just as a learning exercise. I can't agree. Linux is certainly huge, and yes

> Modern software is so huge and complicated that it's not feasible to go read it just as a learning exercise. I can't agree. Linux is certainly huge, and yes it's size means it's beyond any newbie's capacity to understand it all. But nonetheless lots of newbies contribute to it regularly. Most of them build up the understanding they need by reading the kernel code. Obviously, that means you don't have to understand all of it to get a lot of benefit from just reading a small subsection. So it is indeed possible to go read the Linux kernel just as a learning exercise. The key point is you don't have to read all of it to get a benefit out of it. Reading just a small subset works just as well as reading the entire source of a small project.