[opportune]

Well, I can definitely say I'm not an expert at it. Theoretically you might have more experience than me. But my job has me reading lots of open source code to try to learn about poorly documented APIs, so I've been kind of forced into it.

For me, I just try to follow the data and logic flow from beginning to where I want to do things. Though if I see something like a "strategy" pattern I ignore it unless I really need to know how it works; same goes for other code branches that seem unimportant to the greater program. You absolutely should use something like an IDE where you can move around quickly and get neat features like jumping to a class definition, find usages, etc. in case you get lost. It definitely takes time and isn't something you can just sit down and do for 8 hours straight. I generally can only look at code for 90 minutes before my eyes start glazing over and I need to take a break.