How do you understand a large chunk of code?

Question

I am a fresh college grad student that just started my job. In my ramp up period, I need to learn a lot of product code. There are some design docs but they do not help much.

Answer 1

Run it through doxygen. This will generate html documentation which will be helpful even if the code does not have proper doxygen-style comments.

Another good advice is to look through the unit tests, if there are any. If there are no unit tests, a good way to understand the code is to write your own unit tests. The effort to do this will pay for itself many times over.