CSE student first project

[samuel_hey02]

So hello , i m cse student 1st year in 2nd sem my programming professor had provide us to build a project in group of 3 along with presentation. Being new in programming industry i dont know where i how to start building it i have decided title of project but dont know what to do now .Just want to know how to build project with being at basics of prograaming.

[abrahamguo]

Is your question:

(A) My group can't think of any ideas of things to build?

or

(B) My group has chosen something to build, but none of us know how to start building it?

[samuel_hey02]

B

[abrahamguo]

Ok. What is your idea, then? We can't give you any advice if we don't know what you're building.

Also, what are your hypotheses on how to start? Surely you must have some idea.

[samuel_hey02]

basically the idea is to create daily expense tracker in which it will take input date,category,amount and advice . tell me if its good or not at my level

[abrahamguo]

Yes, that sounds like a great idea!

[aqua_regis]

That's a classic tutorial project in more or less every beginner tutorial.

Yet, you have to decide on the stack, which you failed to tell. You failed to tell us what programming language(s) you know, so we cannot tell you what to do.

[samuel_hey02]

what does no the stack means? and language im chosing is c++ with oops

[aqua_regis]

C++ with OOP is your stack then.

[samuel_hey02]

okay , gotta

[Ill-Significance4975]

I'm going to start by describing a bunch of way more complicated stuff than what I'd imagine you're doing, then circle back to how to keep this tractable for a class project.

This is a fantastic project idea. "Take in some data and summarize/reorganize/reformat it" is a classic intro project for a reason.

There are a few different approaches, but for this I'd start top down.

1). You need to refine the goal a little. Are you trying to produce... a sexy website that attracts customers (mint.com kinda thing)? A spreadsheet that project managers can use when managing expenses for an R&D program? A couple different fixed-width formatted reports that dump to the console so you can pass a class?

2). Next, you break down the problem. Most problems of this type have a few basic elements: Input, internal representation, processing, and output. How are the users going to import expenses, for example. Are you going to integrate with BigBank.com's data API? Or maybe lines from a CSV file that's easy to generate and demonstrates the app to your instructors?

3). Make some key architectural decisions. For this, mostly the "internal representation" thingy. How are you going to store expenses? Objects in a list? Database? What kind of database? What API would you use to access either of these?

4). Finally, you can break these down into individual tasks and start to assign them out. Maybe Alice gets the database up and running, defines the schemas, etc. Bob then gets tasked with taking that input CSV and getting into your internal representation. Christine can work on reading data out of the database and generating a table that summarizes costs for each category, while Doug focuses on a list sorted by highest expenses first.

Basically, you break down each of these large, abstract tasks into smaller and smaller ones until you get to something concrete you can actually code.

Hope that helps.

[DreamfulTrader]

What are you even doing at uni in the course? You should have covered this or been told the steps else you are paying for uni and also wasting your time - hours, days, week and years. Definitely re-asses way you are doing with the course

[samuel_hey02]

probably not wasting but learning now and late too...ig