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General Discussion

What do I need to learn in order to build a background checking site?

I am looking to build a background checking site. In the site I imagine the following steps will be taken into consideration:

  1. User provides information about the person who will be checked.
  2. Person who will have a background check needs to validate that he/she agree with background check.
  3. Need to pull credit data, criminal data, perhaps job data from different sources.

I am pretty proficient with HTML and CSS and now battling my way through JQuery. I am also quite good with SQL from working as a data analyst. The reason I ask is because I want to focus my learning as much as possible...

My question is in short...what would I need to learn/videos I need to watch to accomplish this? I am thinking knowledge of PHP and Ruby should be in order after I am done with Jquery...

3 Answers

Hello Alcibiades, You will need to learn a few more languages in order to accomplish something like that. depending on how you're going to gather the data will determine which languages to use.

  1. Java
  2. C and C++
  3. R
  4. SQL
  5. Perl

HTML and CSS are great for the front end of the site. The appearance. But a website has multiple layers.

  1. HTML & CSS = Front End is like the paint job of your car
  2. Javascript & jQuery is like the added features to your car like the sports tires, sun roof, wifi, navigation, etc
  3. PHP, Ruby on Rails and MySql = the engine of your car.
  4. Other coding languages provide the Nitrous Oxide for your car. They give it the power to do what you need.

Sorry for the car analogy, its just the way I describe stuff.

Basically you will need to learn a server side language. You can check out this link that shows you the most popular languages to use for Data Mining and Analytics.

http://www.kdnuggets.com/2013/08/languages-for-analytics-data-mining-data-science.html

http://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/top-languages-for-analytics-data-mining-data-science

http://www.predictiveanalyticstoday.com/top-15-free-data-mining-software/

I tend to like PHP since there is so much documentation on it and it's easier to find help for projects. I have no experience with Ruby so I can't give you feed back on that.

Hopefully this helps. Don't get discouraged. A lot of learning yes but great rewards when you reach your goal. If time is of the essence, then I would consider bringing on a team of developers to help you out. You can either hire them as independent contractors or you can offer them some form of stock in your venture.

Good luck.

You can also just use PHP and MySql to query the database if you have access to the various databases with the information you will need. Some information might be public and other information might be proprietary where you would need to given access to the company data through an api.

One possible issue might be that if you are gathering information from various databases then your system might be slow to deliver all the information. If allowed you would want to gather all the data into one centralized database and then run queries against that one database.

Thanks Joel! That was quite helpful! I am already quite skillful with SQL from being a data analyst! so just need a server side language! I am going to keep on brushing up my front-end skills and then engaging in a 3 month Ruby course.