Want to write a simple (maybe) program

I dont understand why you dont just make a php website with a mysql backend and have people login.

there are already plenty of cms's you could just edit the design of and your away. it also means that you can sell this to anyone with a web browser which is pretty much everyone these days.

you would easily be able to add more recipes and everyone would be able to view them rather then pushing out a binary update to everyone every time you want to add a new recipe.

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Originally Posted by optimus_prime

i'm not sure what way you decided to go, but there are tons of free code dealing with database in all programming languages. just google, there are lots :)

as far as i understand, your software has only one table, the recipes one, and that's basic stuff, you can find examples for it in any programming book and on any learning site. just be patient and persistent :)

if your recipes are unsorted, maybe it would be good start to create database first and deal with the ui later. design it on paper first (like "it would have following fields: index recipe nutritional value type of diet"...) than transfer it into access or sql - whatever you feel more comfortable with. i advise you to use access because it's pretty simple and well explained, and your database is small and won't choke it. than use some visual tool to create ui (like delphi, visual studio or whatever) and connect it to database. every step of these basic operations will surely be explained in the help of apps you decide to work with.

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Thanks optimus. I'll stick with it as I do find it interesting and would like to learn a bit of programing. Thanks again for your help and advice.

You too 4play. I have considered just doing a website, and I might. Thanks

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Originally Posted by optimus_prime

as far as i understand, your software has only one table, the recipes one, and that's basic stuff, you can find examples for it in any programming book and on any learning site. just be patient and persistent :)

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I don't know if just having one table is a good idea if he wants to run searches on ingredients. It might be better to store ingredients on their own table as there are more than one ingredient to one dish and not a fixed number of ingredients in dishes.

EDit: It is possible to do it with one table, obviously, by checking for a substrings in the ingredient field, or whatever. But I might do it with more tables. Maybe one table for dishes, with comments about each dish, like what they are good for or whatever, diet perhaps, then one table for ingredients, possibly with a nutritional value per gram of that ingredient, and one table linking the two other tables, with one row for each combination of dish and ingredient, with the amount of the ingredient in grams. If I needed the nutritional value of each dish I'd calculate it from the sum of the nutritional values of its ingredients. If he wanted to be very specific about what was in each ingredient I might split things up even further.

I agree with Snee. Nice systems design :smilie4:

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Originally Posted by Snee

EDit: It is possible to do it with one table, obviously, by checking for a substrings in the ingredient field, or whatever. But I might do it with more tables. Maybe one table for dishes, with comments about each dish, like what they are good for or whatever, diet perhaps, then one table for ingredients, possibly with a nutritional value per gram of that ingredient, and one table linking the two other tables, with one row for each combination of dish and ingredient, with the amount of the ingredient in grams. If I needed the nutritional value of each dish I'd calculate it from the sum of the nutritional values of its ingredients. If he wanted to be very specific about what was in each ingredient I might split things up even further.

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of course you're right, and he could also add separate table for diets too :D
in the end that all depends on the data available to the op, so that's probably the major thing that will guide his design :)

Is there a particular book that anyone would recommend for someone wanting to write code? How about one of the Idiot's books?

depends what sort of code you want to write?

I'm thinking C+ but, again, this is something I'm new at and do not have a full understanding of.

c++ primer is well worth a read. just have a look on torrentspy for it.

Thanks. Looks better than some of the tutorials I have been reading.