I am a college student studying computer science and would one day like to work on operating systems. The part of ubuntu that really interests me is Unity and I would like to study it and possibly contribute to it.

I was reading the wiki pages about it and it was saying to get a copy of all the required components and then start hacking. Would it be wise to do this in a virtual machine with ubuntu on it? Do you have any advice on a good place to start? Do you know of any common pitfalls? Should I also post in the irc for this?

Thanks