If you want to jump in and help right away the JSON files are a nice place to help contribute while you are still learning more about how to code other things.
That said for the programming things if you have no experience already then I highly suggest learning an easier language first, then moving to learn C/C++. 90% of learning how to code comes down to learning how to think, regardless of language, so once you’ve learned that from one language learning a new language is largely just a matter of learning the new syntax (something the online docs files are very good at). My personal suggestion goes to Learn python the hard way and then maybe followed by learn C the hard way, both of which can be viewed for free online or purchased to include the videos for about $30 each.
Once you’ve got python down and maybe have read the first bit of the C book, I highly suggest jumping in on github. There’s often someone in the IRC channel who can help get you setup on that front, and then it’s just a matter of finding something you want to add and making a PR (or looking at how other people do things and trying to figure out how they did them).
(Most of this I’ve already said in your PM, but I figured I’d post it here for other people too 
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If you are on windows I highly suggest getting Notepad++. Mac OS X doesn’t have quite a nice editor, and for now Text wrangler is probably your best bet; though I currently have high hopes for the new text editor made by github, Atom, which looks like it’s got a nice shot at becoming similar to Notepad++ while being Mac compatible.
