Paperwork due by Wednesday, April 11th at 9:00 AM
The purpose of this assignment is to give you more practice with creating top-down design documents and breaking large problems down into managable, small chunks.
I want you to eventually create a program that parses through a very large CSV file full of real NBA player information and prints out a number of statistics. However, for this assignment, I just want you to create a heirarchical solution tree to be reviewed by your Program Manager (namely, me.) Your heirarchical solution tree should look similar to the trees in the presentation in Session Thirty One and drawn or graphed on a sheet of paper.
This assignment looks simple, but can actually be very hard. I don't want you to stop making modules in your tree until you have changed all your abstract steps into concrete steps. Remember, concrete steps can be translated directly into Python code, where abstract steps need to be broken down and thought about. For example, the step determine top 10 players is still an abstract step, because we still don't know how to do that in Python. However, the step read input file into list of lines is a concrete step, because we can implement that step directly with the method fileObject.readLines().
Specifically, I'll want your program to print out the top 10 NBA player names based on the following:
The abbreviations on the right hand side of the equation correspond to the fields in the statistics file. You can check out the the meanings of each of the abbreviations here
To see what kind of input file you'll be dealing with, please download one of the following:
The format of this file is easy to understand. Open the file by right clicking on the file and selecting "Open With" and selecting a text editor of some kind like Notepad++ or Wordpad. The first line tells you the names of all the columns After that, each line’s data corresponds to one player’s career statistics. Each field is separated by a comma.
Notice that, in addition to the very first line, which is the header information, there appears to be a blank line followed by a line of "garbage" at the bottom of the file. This will become an issue later in the assignment.
We have to somehow read the information from the file and sort it, depending on what we are sorting for (points scored, rebounds, etc.).
Remember that lists can be sorted using list methods. However, if we just put all the points scored in a single list and sorted that list, we would have no corresponding player names -- we would just have a list of sorted numbers! Instead, we might want to create a small list consisting of [points scored, first name, last name] for each line in the file and append that small list to a big master list. Putting the points scored and player names in small lists helps us keep data together that we want to stay together. When we have our giant list of small lists, we can call a sort on that giant list, and it will sort all the small lists based on the first field in each small list, which was points scored! Finally, we can iterate through all the small lists in the master list and print out the points scored and the player name.
This time, you won't be uploading your homework onto eLearning. Instead, I want you to turn in the following as stapled paperwork in class the day the assignment is due with your name on the top: