[Faugaun]

OK....well hmmm...I am interested in giving a go at the add-on development world.

Not exactly sure what I am getting into though. Let me give some background on me.

1989'ish I would edit code in qbasic
1995'ish I created website with Angel fire HTML style - it sucked but I was in middle school.
1998'ish I did the script kiddie thing with MUDs
2001 I graduated Highschool and went to college
2001-2002 I took Visual Basic, wrote a calculator program and a hello world program and a few others, Took Cobal wrote some painfully tedious programs with this and Took and failed Java (apparently sleeping through class = fail)...also took a course concepts of programming (basically flowcharts and algorythm design). I then decided computer science made my hobby (computers) less fun and changed majors.
2012 - Coded from scratch a java based hello world android app
2013 - developed decent skills programming in statistical software packages (SAS and R) and I am fairly comfortable with those.

Anyways so I've been thinking about trying out addons though ATM I don't have a project idea and I dunno exactly how big a hole I am jumping into. Reading a few online guides it seems I just need a text editor and to get familiarity with the api functions that I might want to use and the rest seems like formatting, matrixes, and standard program logic (if then else end) and assigning values to functions that are predefined or defining new functions.

OK, well I kinda lied I do have a project idea but its not very well developed...basically a data gathering add-on that creates a data table based on skills and character stats for back end analysis (this wouldn't be pushed to the depository unless I could find a way to incorporate the data analysis component in an automated fashion within the add-on and thus provide useful information to the end user).

I guess what I am interested in knowing:

Will my previous coding help me jump into the addons world or am I starting at a very basic level?
Is there room for another add-on developer or the table is pretty full ATM?
A suggestion on a starter add-on to get me up to speed?
Any other advice you might give a newcomer?

Also it seems there are three main file types utilized

.txt (text editor simple)
.lua (looks like this could be done in notepad and saved in the correct format? Is there a better way, especially for debugging etc...?)
.xml (again like lua this seems like notepad and saving in correct file type? But perhaps there is a better way?)

I think that covers it so thanks in advance.