From: Martin DeMello <martindemello@...>
Date: 2011-02-13T17:11:02+09:00
Subject: Re: Choosing an office suite

On Sat, Feb 12, 2011 at 7:37 PM, Hilary Bailey <my77elephants@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Therefore at this point I think that I have gathered a whole lot of
> valuable information from a great community. My approach will be to
> attack my dream with the following curriculum:
>        a)as described by Phillip G -Pick up the necessities of HTML,
> CSS,    and JavaScript - Learn about application security (this is very,
> very important on the internet!)- Learn about deployment options for
> Rails.
>        b) as mentioned by Shern - Check out <http://htmldog.com
>        c) as noted by Guecker928 - (during the learning process),
> seek-out a marketing\legal\strategic plan.
>        d) As the whole community have said - take time and avoid
> shortcuts.

I would suggest an alternative approach:

a. Learn the basics of SQL
b. Learn how to design a schema, use it to create a database, get a
large sample dataset into that database and perform complex queries
c. Get your analytical software written to work with the result sets
from those queries
d. Write some ruby code to tie all the above together.

At this point you have a solid commandline application that will do
your data analysis. *Now* you can look at putting a UI to it - learn
HTML, CSS and Javascript for the frontend, and Rails or whatever for
the backend. Start by having a small web form that lets the user enter
some simple search and limit criteria, does the data analysis, and
returns the results as a webpage. Proceed from there.

If you are planning on forming a company to do this, another option
would be to talk a programmer friend into doing some work on it in his
spare time, in return for stock.

martin