Sure using an application shouldn't be an issue.
And I don't disagree with your view that best coding practices is a lot better than falling into bad practices
But by their own admission the OP is pretty much a beginner programmer - and that's in VB - and thus is hardly likely to be able to contribute or fork either of the apps you link. Nor, I'd suggest, to learn from them. They'd have to learn C++ first, for example, which is hardly the 'easy' language they were hoping for ... (in fact, I rather suspect they'd find it hard to actually locate the source code in git, as I 'd hazard they don't really know what git is ...)