Project HUGE: Exercise List - A Journey Into Object Oriented Programing

I love working out. I love taking steel and moving it around. It's an awesome feeling. What I'd like to do is take that passion and parlay it into some object oriented programming goodness. Basically, I want to do what I was hoping to do with Skin Spider, but on a much much smaller scale (at least to begin with) and, actually finish it this time. And so, a new project beings - Project HUGE: Exercise List.

The project is going to be really small. It will consist of just 2-3 pages:

• Search Page
• Exercise List
• Add New Exercise

I say 2-3 as I am not sure that I will even separate the search from and the listing page. But you get the idea - very simple. The beauty of it, though, is that exercises can be expressed in somewhat complex, but highly definitive ways. For example, what you might call a "Bench Press", could also be called, "Bilateral multi-joint shoulder flexion in the transverse plane". Furthermore, that can be broken down into the following components:

• Multi-joint shoulder flexion
• Multi-joint elbow extension

As you can see, even though the premise is simple, there is a lot of room here for relationships that might benefit from some object oriented programming. I hope to set up the project environment just like Skin Spider was set up - where you could view the code files and see the progress. Then, I am going to attack this project in an iterative fashion; first, I will throw this together in a procedural manner (aka the way I always do things). Then, I will apply object oriented programming techniques.

I know there are a lot of OOP style projects out there that aim to teach, but I am a hands-on guy. I simply don't have the ability to learn just from looking at other people's code. Too many paint chips eaten as a child I suppose. As I go, I am sure I will learn from many of the tutorials out there. I will try to give credit where credit is due.

Note: I know that exercises can become very complex and actually grow to combine multiple exercises (ex. Lunge and Curl or Clean and Press). For this project though, I am going to consider those types of things a single exercise. Maybe in the future, there can be the concept of a "complex" exercise, but not for this project.

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