Introduction

(computer noises) - Hello, and welcome to Code Clinic. My name is Bill Weinman. Code Clinic is a monthly course where a unique problem is introduced to a collection of lynda.com authors. In response, each author will create a solution using their programming language of choice. You can learn several things from Code Clinic, different approaches to solving a problem, the pros and cons of different languages and some tips and tricks to incorporate into your own coding practices.

This month, we're working on a problem common to anyone building a web site or a report, specifically merging live data with static templates. Data is only useful when we can effectively communicate it to someone else and to do that, we need to format it into some sort of meaningful visual representation. Sometimes this takes the form of a printed report. More likely, it means publishing data to a web page. In this problem, we have the preformated HTML page and two data files in CSV format.

Our job is to write code that will insert the data files into the web page and apply the proper formatting. We're going to use the files created by James Williamson in chapter nine of his course titled Dreamweaver CC Essential Training. James provides all of the material we need for this challenge. I invite you to download the example files for that course if you would like to attempt your own solution. In the next videos, I'll show you how I solved this challenge in C++.