Re: Looking for Suggestion on Learning

On Saturday, February 05, 2011 6:22:47 pm ray joseph wrote:

>
> Thank you for the clarifications. I would like to address the guiding
> questions you presented:
>
> 1) What OS(s) do I want to deploy on? Windows, right now XP.
> 2) What programming language(s) do I want to work with? Python.
> 3) Where do I want to deploy, desktop/Web? Desktop at first.
> 4) What do I want to build, simple SOHO apps .... enterprise apps? SOHO
> at first.
>
> My responses represent what I expect a learning path to take. Although I
> will probably not be programming for web or enterprise, what I build may be
> a prototype for such. I am not looking for the tools to build the big
> apps, I just want to learn the basics, or more important right now, the
> simple.

Since you are working with Python, another suggestion:
http://sqlkit.argolinux.org/sqlkit/tour.html#

This has only recently shown up and I myself am only at the reading the docs
stage, but it looks interesting.

>
> Please help me understand what you mean by " I tend to handle
> admin/creation with text files run through psql."

psql is the command line Postgres client. I create my database
objects(tables,views,functions) as separate text files in a text editor(Jedit in
my case). I can then use psql to read the files and create/drop objects. I can
also work inside psql to do database chores. Another option that I failed to
mention earlier is pgAdmin3 (http://www.pgadmin.org/). It is a GUI admin tool
for Postgres. If you are using the Windows installer it is included.

>
> I looked at Dabo and it looks like it is for developing applications. Is
> there a tool for designing a database?

Pen and paper:) No really that is how I usually start out, sketching out the
design on a legal pad. This gets turned into the text files I mentioned above. I
have no real experience with using GUI tools for this so I can offer no
suggestions. There have been discussions on this topic on the mailing list, so
if you search the mailing list archive you will find suggestions.

>
> Ray

--
Adrian Klaver
adrian(dot)klaver(at)gmail(dot)com