I have almost no programming experience beyond making a small clicker game in Scratch a few years ago. I want to create a system that takes a large list of animals and organizes them into the six main animal groups—invertebrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. Then I'd like to sort the animals in each group into cold, warm, or hot categories based on the average temperature of their natural habitat. I tried doing this manually, but it quickly became overwhelming, and I'd prefer to learn how to build the system myself rather than have it generated automatically. What would be a realistic way for a beginner to approach this?
3 Answers
There isn’t really a one-click solution because this is several separate problems: collecting the animal data, deciding how to classify each animal, defining what counts as cold or hot, storing the information, and then displaying or searching it. Start with a tiny sample—maybe ten animals—and make a simple table first. Once that works, you can gradually learn programming and expand it. Trying to build the complete version immediately would be a lot for a beginner.
A spreadsheet is probably the easiest starting point. You could have columns for the animal name, animal group, habitat, average temperature, and temperature category. You can enter a small amount of data, create rules that assign cold, warm, or hot, and later turn the spreadsheet into a database or web application if you still want to. Be aware that habitat temperature and an animal’s body temperature are different things, so define exactly what your categories mean before sorting everything.
If you eventually want a searchable website, the usual structure would be a database plus an application that reads and filters the records. PostgreSQL would be a solid free database, and a tool such as Directus can provide much of the data-management interface without requiring you to build every screen from scratch. Graph databases could also work if you want to represent relationships between animals, habitats, and classifications, but that is probably more advanced than you need at the beginning.
That makes sense. I was probably treating the whole project as one task instead of breaking it into smaller pieces.