Learning C++: What do i need to study in order to create my idea for a program?

[Vladwow91]

Greetings,

I've recently started to get involved in learning c++ as a hobby, and i am quite sure i will pursuit it as an career after i complete my a course in mathematics this fall.

However, i'd like to get deeper into understanding programming before i take it up in school, and i've had an idea for a program in the back of my head that would be to great personal benefit if i acctually could make it work.

I have followed 3dbuzz guide on c++, i've followed this forum for the last 2-3 months and picked up on things. This is truely a great forum for c++ novices.

My idea:
- To create a background windows program that i can prompt with a spesific tv seriers, from say epguides.com; and have it automatically add their air times to a callendar. Have the program remind me x minutes/hours/days before the show starts.

I was hoping i could get some guidelines on what to read up on and what i would need to use in order to complete such a program, or is this far to advanced for a novice to learn over time?

Thanks in advance, Vladwow

[Incubbus]

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/bb308891.aspx (Bits & Bytes)... <- May help in getting your head around realizing what could be needed (network, interpreting, etc)

(http://www.learncpp.com) <- something I always suggest:D...

[Galik]

I guess your looking at scraping data off of the epiguides.com website.

You could use CURL to retrieve the web pages:

http://curl.haxx.se/

Then maybe some regex lib for extracting the info you want. I generally use boost::regex.

http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_43_0/libs/regex/doc/html/index.html

[Vladwow91]

Thanks for the links. I've started to read up on those sites Incubbus linked.
However, i think i need quite a bit more experience under my belt to even comprehend what you linked, Galik. Thanks anyhow.

Anyone care to explain very fast what the basic idea behind retrieving & scrapping data of a webpage?

[Galik]

Vladwow91 wrote:

Anyone care to explain very fast what the basic idea behind retrieving & scrapping data of a webpage?

The idea is that you obtain the html text of a given web page in a string and then scan through that string looking for the information you want.

In your case that might be TV show times.