Originally Posted by Fireproof213
thanks loads, do you have any recommendations for a new addon programmer to read the code of to pick up some knowledge?
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For the love of God and Country don't be afraid to a) ask the author, b) ask someone else, or c) look foolish.
Far too many people hack code together rather than commit C. Truth is, decent developers will go out of their way to not make you feel stupid or foolish
if you are earnestly trying to learn something and wind up asking a silly question: it builds a better author community, safer/better mods for the community, generally they're returning the favor for others helping them, the more you know the more you can help others and give them a break
, and in general they're in touch with the beauty and poetry of "Good Code" just for it's own sake. (But beware asking b/c you're too lazy to try it yourself: that's a good way to quickly shut a lot of doors)
You can also figure a lot of things out by seeing how Blizzard did it with it's xml/lua by trolling
http://wowcompares.com.
By far, the best thing I've found is to look at different mods that solve similar problems and see the different approaches and what is similar. You sometimes wind up spending a lot of time in the LUA language reference when you're just starting out but it's a good technique to help you see the forest among the trees, and it helps you determine what is/isn't "overly complex code" that might solve a problem your mod won't ever have.