Reading code is no good to start with. (Score 1)

There are some people here who says that you should read and understand the code but that is just stupid to start reading the code. The best thing to do is to use tools to analyze the code with tools so that you can look at the system at different abstraction levels. People that say that you should start at code level have probably never had a real job or have never seen a system with 50k+ loc. When i analyze a system i use grep,sed and graphviz to draw various diagrams for me at different levels. In that way i can understand the sytem much quciker and i dont have to understand all the details directly. After that i can zoom in to the details by starting at the right parts of the system. So try to find good tools and if you cant find any try to use graphviz in combination with your text processing tools of choice.