Re: Looking for an online mentor

On Thu, 8 Dec 2016, Adrian Klaver wrote:

> GUI's only get you so far. At some point you will need to dive deeper to
> get what you. I am mostly a self taught programmer(biologist by training)
> so I understand the hill you are facing. The language I use is Python,
> mainly because to me it made sense. For you it might be a good choice as
> it is quite prevalent in the data analysis world. There are a lot of
> places to turn to to learn how to use it. My suggestion for seeing if it
> is something you can use would be to start here:

+1 for Python

> Go through at least the Introduction to Python part. The rest has to do
> with Django, Web framework built using Python.

Mike Driscoll has a blog (I don't recall the URL) and his Python 101 is a
very good introduction. There are also a lot of online tutorials.

I would suggest starting by learning a general programming language
(specifically Python). That puts you in a learnable mindset. SQL is a
set-oriented language and is quite different from procedural, object
oriented, and functional languages.

You can learn on your own, and help is readily available on various
maillists. I'm an ecologist who learned FORTRAN (mostly self-taught) in grad
school, C on my own, and then moved to Python on my own. If you're
interested in data analysis Python's the way to go. Your description of what
you want to accomplish can be achieved using three components: postgres (and
SQL as the language it uses), Python as the glue between the database back
end and the user interface, and a widget set (PyQt5 is a good one) for the
UI.

If you want to develop a web-based application then replace the UI with
django.

Rich