[asterisk-dev] Learning To Code for Asterisk

[Jonathan Rose]

Greetings!  We are generally pretty eager to hear about new people
wanting to help out with the development of Asterisk.  To start, I'd
recommend that you start hanging out in #asterisk-dev on
irc.freenode.net frequently.  All of our in-house developers can be
found on that channel and it's a good way to get fairly immediate
feedback, so we'd be able to help you get started on picking some
beginner projects.  If you need an IRC client, I'd recommend XChat.  Or
if you are connecting on Windows for whatever reason, XChat-WDK.

Working on an open source project can be a very useful method for
improving your programming skills too.  Not only will it acclimate you
to working on large scale software projects created with the efforts of
a myriad of people, but you'll also be receiving feedback from many
programmers on your own work, many of whom are quite accomplished.

Honestly, I'd say the simplest way to start looking at Asterisk from a
programmer's perspective would probably be to start fiddling with some
of the applications.  They vary wildly in complexity, but there are
plenty of simple ones in there that can help to show you the ropes
including app_saycounted, app_sayunixtime, and app_playtones which will
help you understand a little about how applications get connected to
channels and play audio.  The issue tracker might interest you if you
want to do more useful work, but if you do go that route, you should
expect to spend a lot of time on analyzing obscure problems that you may
or may not be able to easily solve.

Anyway, it's good to hear you are interested,
Jonathan Rose - Asterisk Open Source Developer

On Thu, 2011-09-29 at 12:27 -0400, Luke Hamburg wrote:
> I desperately want to contribute to the Asterisk project but alas my coding
> skills are not up to the task.  I took some C classes ages ago and have read
> a book or two but 'rusty' is a bit of an understatement.  Nonetheless, I am
> eager and have a near limitless supply of Coffee and Determination.
> 
> Can anyone recommended some entry points for beginning to learn to code for
> the Asterisk project?  I want to understand the data structures, methods,
> functions etc.  I have seen both
>   http://www.asterisk.org/developer/resources
>     and I have read
>   http://www.aosabook.org/en/asterisk.html
> 
> but I am looking for more.  If this belongs in asterisk-users I apologize.
> 
> Luke
> 
> 
> 
> --
> _____________________________________________________________________
> -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com --
> 
> asterisk-dev mailing list
> To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit:
>    http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-dev