Question

I know a little python and thats about it.
My goal is to make a program that takes some user input and prints out 2 things:

(pardon the useless visual aids)

A mon-sun list like:

mon     tues     wed     ...

jon 1   alex 3   sam 2

and a calender with the same info:

                           feb
        1       2     3      4...
        jon     alex  sam
        joe     lun   fred

        8       9     10 

Question: Do I set out to build my own calendar from scratch? Or would it be more logical to somehow modify say the existing calendar module that comes with the python standard library? or I’m i completely going about this the wrong way and should consider… (something)

I have been scanning the calendar module for python and aren’t confident i could control that much code. But building my own thing seems equally difficult.

additional: The program will get used probable by nobody but theoretically it would need to run on a windows, I haven’t figured out the (Gui or web application), security or how to save/back-up/access the user data.

Answer 1

As far as I can tell, it looks like you want to build some sort of calendar/scheduling application. As you’ve noticed, there are actually a lot of details involved in making something like this work. In the process you’ve run in to one of the most common questions programmers run in to.

Should I use an existing library or build something myself?

There’s quite a bit of discussion on this topic, and in the end, it all comes down to circumstance.

So, I’m going to try to address your circumstance a little bit. As a beginner, working with a large body of code is hard, and doing something you haven’t done before is also hard, doing both at once can be a recipe for frustration. For this reason I would suggest taking one of two routes:

1. Find a tutorial that describes something similar to what you want to do and follow it.

2. Narrow down your focus to the smallest possible problem you could solve, and then write code to do that.

With option one, I think you’ll have some luck searching for “To-do list” tutorials. This is a little simpler than a full blown calendar, but there’s plenty of room to do interesting things in this space. In fact programmers are constantly writing to-do list software. With a little quick googling, I found this tutorial on how to make a to-do list website with Django. I’m not sure if it’s very good, but if it isn’t there are certainly others.

For option two, you’re going to want to start with significantly narrowed scope. I would start by thinking about the question “How can I store a calendar?” You might think about using a python dictionary with days (represented by integers) as the keys, and lists of to-do items as the values. Then you could start to approach the question “How can I display this?”

I would recommend sticking to printing things out to the terminal for a beginner. Unless your goal is to learn GUI or web programming, straying in that direction will take a significant amount of time away from solving whatever problem you’re trying to solve.

I just saw your question about your first project. I would like to second the advice given by Ben Taitelbaum

Also don’t worry too much about the interface, because you’re going to decide this version sucks and you need to throw it away at some point. Then (and not a moment sooner) will be the right time to think about the interface

And extend it to include your internals. If you decide to build something separate from python’s calendar module, you’re probably going to throw it out and start over. If you decide to build something using python’s calendar module, you’re also probably going to throw it out and start over.

As a note, building something to throw it away isn’t a bad thing. It’s actually described in depth in the book The Mythical Man Month. While the description is about professional software engineering, I think it applies to beginners as well. It’s hard to know the best way to solve a problem if you’ve never solved that type of problem before. The best way to approach the problem may be to just accept that your first solution won’t work, but build it anyway.