First of all, congradulations! You’re taking a big step towards becoming an accomplished programmer. Second, yikes! I wish you all the good luck there is to be had. Your first project can be quite intimidating and stressful, so here are some helpful tips to get through your first big project.
Step One is, Don’t Panic! It’s all going to be okay. You are going to survive and thrive.
Step Two is to gather and explore your resources. Watch videos, read articles, and start creating a blueprint in your head of how you want to set up your files
Step Three is file setup. Where is your environment? Which file do you run to start your program?
Step Four is actual coding. I recommend you make sure you’ve filled in your environment and your running file first.
Now you’re actually coding. What do you do? Well, pick a place you think is a good starting point and just fudge some code. It’s okay to hardcode now what you plan to smartcode later. In fact, that’s probably the best way to approach it. You just want to Start. Somewhere, somehow. Your code will find ways to grow if you just follow along with it.
For Learn’s CLI project your main three classes are going to be your object class, your CLI class, and your scraper class. You may have other supportive classes for your specific project.
Your CLI class is a great place to start. Create a viable menu that can properly go through choices and bring you where you want to go.
Next up should probably be your Scraper class. This is the hard one. I highly recommend using a repl to play around with scraping until you get what you wanted to get. That’s what I did and I found that it made the whole process go a lot quicker. You want to keep all your scraping in your Scraper class so plan a way to have all your object class methods do what you want them to with your scraper seperate.
Finally, put together your object class. What are your attr_accessors? Your readers? Your writers? How will you assign your core values that you are using for this program?
Now that you’ve got the bulk of your code written, make sure it works with the CLI. Do your edits and cleanups. Make your code as dry as possible. Combine things that don’t need to be seperate. Change code so you don’t have variables defined and used once then never again. Take a finetoothed come and really look at each line and ask yourself if that’s the best way of doing things.
The biggest thing to remember is you got this! Ask for help whenever you need it. You are not alone in this!