Hannah Moutran's Second Final Project Update!

Done:

download and clean up CSV file
create dictionary with keys
create menu with different options for user
make conditionals that will guide output from user choices
create functions
create functionality for menu choices: 1,2,3,4,5,7,8
figure out how to sort by a column
figure out how to create graphs
write code for recommending a random book
figure out how to keep user’s choices saved

To do:

menu choice 6: start the user with a clean slate
add another menu choice: help
add an explanation of the program at the beginning

May do:

improve graphing/perhaps add more graph choices
make the saving of the user’s data better. Right now it’s probably messier than it needs to be
clean up the code in general, try to make it more sleek
test program with longer version of csv file, maybe switch

make code talk
write pull request, at least 1500 words

My project is going well. There’s some stuff that I still have to do, as you can see above, but I feel really good about how much I have gotten done. There are definitely things that were never on my official to do list, but that I realized were important while testing. For example, I made a new menu choice for printing, and stopped printing the dataset every time the user made a choice. Now the program just tells them what they’ve chosen, but doesn’t print the whole thing until they choose the print option. Some things on my list were much easier than I thought they would be, for example the random book choice and graphing the data. Visualizing capability is built into Pandas, and it’s also easy to do the random choice function once you know how to convert a column into a list.

Here’s the code for the bar graph I have right now:

selected_df.plot(kind = 'barh',
        x = 'Publisher',
        y = 'Weeks_on_List',
        color = 'blue')
    plt.title('Publishers Marks')
    plt.show()

As you can see, it’s fairly simple. All of the information on how to do it is in the pandas documentation, but I also got some help from reading many, many blog posts about what the different options were (https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/how-to-plot-a-dataframe-using-pandas/ was particularly helpful). I saw a lot of interesting stuff that I haven’t used, so I may do (see list above) more with the graphing capability of the program.

Making a column into a list was as simple as this:

titles_list = selected_df["Title"].values.tolist()

I found out how to do that here: https://sparkbyexamples.com/pandas/conver-pandas-column-to-list/

Once I had the list, then I could just do this:

print(random.choice(titles_list))

Some of the things I have on my to do list are very concrete, and others are very open-ended. That’s purposeful. I’ve dedicated a lot of time and I’ve learned a lot already. At the same time, I don’t think there’s really an end to what I can learn and how I can improve the program. I’ll just continue until I’m satisfied enough with it, and then call it a day.

Here’s the Trinket: