How do I go about learning to program simple bookkeeping software in JAVA?

I know enough Java to run many very simple programs and really just learning the basics of GUI. I want to program a piece of software for basic bookkeeping as a project to practice learning more java and I am wondering what you would recommend I do (or where to begin).





I have thought about the finding some existing bookkeeping programs and just manipulating them to what I am trying to accomplish but I also wonder if I would be better off (from a learning perspective) building something from scratch. The program on overall won't be too complex but will include some input and outputting features and probably a download to excel component.





All help is appreciated.





Thanks.

How do I go about learning to program simple bookkeeping software in JAVA?
My advice: do both. Start your own project from scratch so that you learn the basic Java stuff, including all the project-related things like where to put files, how to set up unit tests, and all the other stuff that you have to know to program effectively (and all of this is above and beyond learning the syntax of the language).





But you should also get comfortable browsing through OPC (Other People's Code), so you might want to take a peek at some completed Open Source projects like jGnash or GFP (both available at sourceforge.net). This is especially helpful if you are not a domain expert in finance and you don't want to spend all of your time figuring out (or reinventing) basic financial concepts.





This may sound like the hard answer, but if you want to learn to program, you are right that you should do some things yourself. But if you are going to start your own project from scratch, it would be smart to at least look at some other code to give you some ideas, especially for ideas that are mostly domain-specific. So in the end, you would probably end up doing it both ways anyway!





I hope this helps!





p.s. -- The second link below, for GFP, looks like it should be a typo ("/gfd"), but I got it straight from sourceforge. Weird.