php is more popular than python?

greg, why dont you think this project is too ambitious for a complete beginner?

i imagine it is pretty hard to do all these things together in one project, scraping, database, analysis... is there anyone that has done a big programming/sports betting project and posted about it online? would love to read about it

pretty sure that php is way more popular than python. popular doesnt necessarily mean better, but examples will be more plentiful

i do think its too ambitious for a complete beginner, but so what?

These guys are all correct.
Best way to learn a language is to pick a project you want to attack, and attack it. You'll learn more and more stuff as you go. Even if you scrap one version of code when you hit a "there has to be a better way of doing <x>" wall, and then find that the way is totally different from your current operation, it's fine. You still learned stuff.

And any language based off of C is mega powerful. I write mostly in Perl at work, even as a guy who started off at the company as an excel ninja (blech). It's always neat to learn a new thing that makes your code far more efficient and/or simpler.

And heck, google is your friend as well. Whatever you're trying to do, someone, somewhere, has probably tried it as well, and someone else has probably helped them out. I even once found a genius regex that matches a number in unary notation (example: 111111 = 6) if the number is prime. Unfortunately, I couldn't use it for a prime number generator because the variables became obnoxiously long and memory intensive for my crappy home laptop.

Point is, you want to generate an Elo ranker? Do it! Even if the syntax is different, the logic is the same, and you have the entire world to ask a question to thanks to the Internet. So have fun.

More popular, yes.
Will he want to throw himself out a window if he invests a year in learning it instead of C++, Perl, or Python, only to realize some big project he worked on is full of covert bugs and nonsensical craziness due to bugs that most people would miss? Good chance.

greg its my personal opinion the best way to learn is to start with smaller projects. for instance if you are new to piano you dont start with a beethoven piano concerto, you can still play beethoven, but he has easier pieces.

i would agree

A large project is just a collection of smaller projects. He can still work on the large project by concentrating on one of the smaller parts.

Monarco what language are you going to use?

Oh and good idea and good luck!

Some screenscraping libraries:

Python - Beautiful Soup

Java - JSoup

Thanks again for all the answers and encouragement. I'll update this thread every so often with my progress and maybe questions i'll have.
So far i havent written any actual code yet, only set up a mySQL DB and familiarized myself with that and researched how to get the data from the ATP website. Im focusing on getting the data in the database for now and doing database->website later.

I dont know. PHP seems to be used in a lot of the web scraping tutorials/programs i've seen.

greg nice/unluckyboy: Yeah, there probably are more efficient ways to learn coding. my main reason for doing it this way is the motivation it gives me.

i am doing this too, we will see who finishes first. today i have put in 5 hours so far learning how to scrape data from site. right now i just have the basic idea. i need to collect all the data and put it into huge lists and organize it before putting it into the database. !!