Reading perlguts, PerlGuts Illustrated, perlxstut and perlxs might help. The Porting directory in the perl source also contains a lot useful info.

However, there's a lot of source code with much magic hidden within. I'd suggest a more focussed approach, such as picking a TODO from perltodo and work towards DOing it.

The p5p mailing list (subscribe or archive) and #p5p on irc.perl.org could be sources of assistance, as well as here.

At some point, you will have to learn how to use git. There's a free book, or a more perl oriented cheat sheet in perlgit.

Update:

Another avenue you might like to try, is looking at perl5's bug-tracker (it's much easier to use if you log in first) and see if there are any bugs you can try to fix.

Update^2: Corrected address of #p5p (thanks moritz!)


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In reply to Re: Hacking Perl (I think) by FunkyMonk
in thread Hacking Perl (I think) by Anonymous Monk

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