Programming but with zero experience

[Sparktank]

hypermammut.sourceforge.net/paulstretch/
by Nasca Octavian PAUL
The program is Open-Source and it's released under the version 2 of the General Public License. You can download the source code for Linux or the Windows binaries.

Last year I contacted the author of "Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch" software (AKA PaulStretch) and asked about a few suggestions. The author said that he was too busy to do any more updates to the software and that he was working on something else.

The features I requested mainly consist that (1) it remembers the last opened directory (it always opens/saves to the installed directory of the software) and that (2) if no extension is given that one gets added automatically (you have to add the extension of it just saves as a file with no extension whatsoever; auto-add .wav) and that it also (3) creates a log file of the rendering.

I looked at the source code found on the sourceforge download page and saw some nifty files.
They are mostly .cpp/.h/.fl files. (Google says that it's C++ programming language)
Looking at them through Notepad++ I can see some nifty code and strings.

All completely Greek to me.

If I wanted to try and add a couple features and recompile the program with new code, where would a good start be?
I've got a few bookmarks related to coding and programming but even all that seems Greek to me.

Would anyone be able to help me out, show me some helpful sites, or point me to some very helpful forums for novices and programming?

Software: PaulStretch
Type: Open Source
Licence: version 2 of the General Public License
Platform: Windows XP (32bit)/Windows 7 (64bit)

Feature requests:
+auto add extension if not specified for rendering
+remember last used folder (separate memory for when "opening" and for when "rendering")
+add rendering log (to separate location or same folder as output file)
+option to add [parameters] to output file name ("output [8x 12K Hann].wav")
+ability to use paulstretch as a Command Line Utility (CLI)
++allow piping from other (CLI) software

though the CLI might require much more work.

Any help or pointers to other sites are indeed welcome.
-Sparktank