From: Wendy Randquist <lists@...>
Date: 2013-05-20T05:26:06+09:00
Subject: new, with an idea, and not sure what to learn next

Hi. I've been going through the CodeAcademy courses for Ruby over the
past few weeks, and I spent a couple months last year learning Python
and writing a couple of card game programs. This is my only experience
with programming at all and, despite feeling I have an OK grasp on the
Ruby language, in theory at least, I'm still floundering for where to go
or what to do for practice.

I've been thinking lately that I want to design a program, specifically
for me, that keeps track of my finances. Ideally, when I ran this
program, I'd be able to do things like update the number of hours I've
worked, what I've spent money on, etc. I'd also like to do things that
seem more complicated - for instance, having the program calculate how
much I've worked in a given pay period, or how much money I've spent on
a certain object in the past month - stuff like that.

My "ability" to do any of this includes opening up an online
interpreter, creating an array with my hours worked in the past week or
so, and being able to come up with a sum of those hours and how much
money they've earned me. Which is a step in the right direction, but
when I start thinking about the different things I want the program to
do, I realize that I might need more than just knowledge of the
programming language to get anywhere. I'm happy and eager to spend as
much time as it takes learning new things - I'm developing the program
more for the practice than anything else.

But I want to be able to run this program multiple times... one of my
problems here is that, I can create an array with my hours, then ask for
input (how many hours today? for instance), and add the input into that
array, then sum all of the hours in the array. But once the program is
finished running and I run it again... the array is back to square one.
What kind of knowledge do I need to make it so I can create a program
that would save new data even after I closed it? What do I need to start
googling, above and beyond Ruby syntax, to understand how to do a
project like this? What other sources are there for learning how to do
things like divide time in pay periods and having the program deal with
real-time?

Am I in way over my head? I don't even really know what questions to
ask... but I have a vision for this program and I want to learn how to
write it. Any help or pointers in the right direction would be greatly
appreciated. :)

Thanks!

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