[Tutor] Center Grove Student Mentoring Question

[Dennis Lee Bieber]

On Fri, 8 Apr 2022 14:02:01 -0400, Gavin Woods
<woodsgav000 at students.centergrove.k12.in.us> declaimed the following:

>That is why I'm reaching out to you. My topic for my Genius Hour Project is
>how to code. I was hoping you could answer some questions that I have
>regarding my project.
>

	Don't take this too negatively, but "how to code" is somewhat limiting
-- at least in the industry I went through. "coders" were the bottom rung
(computer operator might have been lower -- they were responsible for
changing ribbons on printers, loading printer paper, swapping mag-tape
reels, and feeding card decks to the mainframe; and maybe running specific
programs at scheduled times in accordance with a "run book"). "coders" were
responsible for taking requirements and algorithms provided by higher level
people (program and system analysts) and turning them into runable code.

	For example -- an electronic checkbook register (have you even
encountered paper checks? <G>).

Input is a time-ordered sequence of checks (withdrawals) and deposits to
the checking account, along with the previous saved check register.
Output is an updated (saved) check register containing the new
transactions, along with a report of the final account balance (or a
listing of the transactions with a running total), and any warnings of
overdrafts (balance less than 0.00).

	Requirements may include clauses for validation of inputs (check
numbers are in ascending sequence or voided, etc.)

	Presuming you mean to come up with an application from scratch, and not
rely upon someone handing you all the high-level work leaving you to
translate into a specific language, you may want to look into tutorials on
"software engineering" -- save OOAD/OOP (object oriented analysis and
design/object oriented programming) for later (though you will run into OOP
at some point if using Python, as much of the standard library is OOP
based.

	At those higher levels, software engineering is language neutral (it
may be difficult, but one can do OOAD with a non-OOP language at the end).

	Starting points: The documentation that comes with most Python installs
should have the language reference manual, the language tutorial, and the
library reference manual. You'll be using the library reference a lot,
though you don't have to memorize all the packages -- the most used will be
the chapters on the standard data types in Python, maybe os and os.path. A
lot of the packages are specific to various Internet protocols which you
may not need.

	Read the tutorial, get familiar with the language reference, and browse
the library reference.

>1. Are there any specific websites/videos that I can use to help me learn
>python?
>
	I don't have any experience with online videos for learning
programming. I tend to prefer printed textbooks, or PDF files, that allow
me to flip back and forth.



-- 
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
	wlfraed at ix.netcom.com    http://wlfraed.microdiversity.freeddns.org/