python first project

[Denis McMahon]

On Fri, 10 Jan 2014 20:18:32 -0800, ngangsia akumbo wrote:

> i have been learning python just for about 5 months now and i have been
> given a task to do. This will be a leap into the programming industry
> for me.
> 
> i am programming a system that will be giving details about finance,
> purchase(bills pending bills and paid bill), employees record and salary
> details, warehouse records.

It sounds as if your project has many aspects to it which may require you 
to understand and implement many different computing tasks.

For example:

You need to either analyse the data records that are required and produce 
a suitable database schema, or you need to work with an existing database 
schema. This may require some competence in developing database schemas, 
and will almost certainly require some sql knowledge in the chosen 
database (not all sqls are equal).

You also need to develop a user interface. First of all you ned to 
consider who will access the user interface, and how? Mobile devices, 
desktop computers, both? Do you want os specific (eg ios, android) apps 
for mobile devices, or will you run in a mobile browser window?

Will the application run on a web server, or locally on a single machine? 
Or will several gui clients connect to a single server host? In the 
latter case, you'll need to develop communication protocols (using a 
webapp removes some of this workload, but is a compromise that may 
require that you need other competences, possibly including but not 
limited to html, javascript and css).

The most important phase of any project is the requirements capture, for 
if you do not capture all the requirements of all the users, you will not 
deliver the project that they want. Users are not just the people who sit 
in front of the screens, they may also be people who will want 
statistical reports based on the database, but who never expect to 
actually touch a computer themselves - they have secretaries for that 
sort of thing. However, if your system can't produce the report that the 
CEO or CFO wants at the end of each month / quarter / year, then it will 
be labelled as crap, even if no-one told you as the system designer that 
this report was required!

So, first of all, you need to go and talk to everyone in the company that 
will use this system and obtain from them details of what they expect the 
system to do, what data they expect to input, and what data they expect 
to receive as outputs from it. Once you understand this, you may be in a 
position to start defining the database schema, and only then are you 
ready to think about the code that will put data into, and get it from, 
the database.

-- 
Denis McMahon, denismfmcmahon at gmail.com