[Tutor] NEWBIE looking for help

[Lloyd Hugh Allen]

Robert Garber wrote:
> 
> I am very new to programing and am hoping that Python is the place to start. My question is this: I am a football coach who is very unhappy with some of the software available to use in scouting and keeping stats. I am certian a program of this nature will need to be set up as some type of database that is searchable ( by formation, field position, player number/position, down and distance, etc...) is Python the language to start with? I have purchased the Sams "TEaching yourself Python in 24 hours" as Alan Gaulds "Learnign to program book". I have also downloaded every tutorial I can find on python. I am enjoying the learning experince and hope that Python is the language to open a whole new world for me.
> Thans for any help,
> Robert
> 
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Python will be an excellent language for that project. I did something
like that back in high school (no longer have the code, I don't think)*
in Pascal; when I did that, the sorting routines (which were the core of
generating the scouting reports--I recall it being used 60% for
predicting play based on formation, and about 30% being whether the ball
was going to go to the strong or weak side based on formation) took up a
good 1/3 of the program. In Python, if you want to sort a list, you use
a command along the lines of 

mylist.sort()

. Much less code to wade through. Good luck.

*Just found the 800k disk that has the Pascal source code (I think--I
hope it doesn't just have the compiled application). Now to find
computer with a drive that can still read 800k disks...