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Book Searching App

This is a sample app to demonstrate the concept of building a Rails application by ingesting a third-party API.

Google Books API

The API used by this app can be found at https://developers.google.com/books/docs/v1/using#api_params. Before digging into the app, feel free to browse the documentation and playing around with the API. For example, you can type the following into the browser URL address bar - https://www.googleapis.com/books/v1/volumes?q=intitle:rails. If the resulting JSON feels overwhelming, I recommend using the JSONView Chrome Extension. All you have to do is add this extension to the Chrome browser and enable it, and your JSON will become that much more readable.

What information does the app display?

The app lets you search books by title and displays a list of books with their title, author, image and description. You are also able to browse some of the book content (COOL - really? REALLY!) and purchase the book from Amazon (You can learn more about how to become an Amazon associate and link to products on amazon.com here)

Is this thing deployed somewhere?

Sure. https://book-search-sample.herokuapp.com/ You start out with an exciting selection of books and are able to search for books of your own.

How was this app created?

Basically, this is very similar to how the Coursera Courses Listing app was created in Lecture 9 and Lecture 10 of Module 3. And, of course, you would substitute the word books instead of the word courses. So, for example,

rails g controller courses index

becomes

rails g controller books index

And then? Can you explain which files I should look at to get a better idea how the app works?

  1. config/routes.rb handles the routing of your app. In this case, it maps the root route to go to the BooksController.
  2. app/controllers/books_controller.rb handles the request by querying the Book model (described next) and forwarding the results (implicitly) to app/views/books/index.html.erb
  3. app/models/book.rb uses HTTParty gem to query the Google Books API.
  4. app/views/books/index.html.erb display the results and contains a search form to keep searching for more books.

Any gotchas?

Take a close look at the Gemfile. For example, you need to specify gem 'pg', '~> 0.20' since for whatever reason the typical gem 'pg' (the latest) is not compatible with Rails, at least not version 4.2.8. (See the following for more info)