Book Reviews

Overview

This web site features 5000 hand picked books allowing users to search, leave reviews for individual books, and see the reviews made by other people. It also uses a third-party API by Goodreads.com, another book review website, to pull ratings from a broader audience. In addition, users are able to query for book details and book reviews programmatically via website's API. Visit live version of the app in this heroku link: https://book-review-website-13032019.herokuapp.com/.

Overview Video

Installation

Pre-requisites

Make sure you have the following installed on your machine:

• postgreSQL
• Python 3.7.2

Proceed to download

1. Clone the repository
2. In your terminal window, navigate into the project
3. Run pip3 install -r requirements.txt to make sure all of the necessary Python packages (Flask, SQLAlchemy and others) are installed
4. Set the environment variables:
   • export FLASK_APP=application.py. On Windows, the command is instead set FLASK_APP=application.py
   • KEY = is your API key, will give you the review and rating data for the book with the provided ISBN number (register at goodreads.com)
   • DATABASE_URL = URI for your local postgreSQL database (for example: postgres://username:password@localhost:5432/databasename )
5. Run tables.sql against your database to create the necessary tables
6. Run python3 import.py to import a spreadsheet in CSV format of 5000 different books to your database
7. Finally execute flask run command in your terminal to start the server

Features of the applications

• Registration: Users are be able to register.
• Login: Users, once registered, should be able to log in to the website with their username and password.
• Logout: Logged in users should be able to log out of the site.
• Search: Once a user has logged in, they are taken to a page where they can search for a book. Users should be able to type in the ISBN number of a book, the title of a book, or the author of a book. After performing the search, the website displays a list of possible matching results, or some sort of message if there were no matches. If the user typed in only part of a title, ISBN, or author name, search page should find matches for those as well!
• Book Page: When users click on a book details from the results of the search page, they are taken to a book page, with details about the book: its title, author, publication year, ISBN number, and any reviews that users have left for the book on the website.
• Review Submission: On the book page, users are be able to submit a review: consisting of a rating on a scale of 1 to 5, as well as a text component to the review where the user can write their opinion about a book. Users won't be able to submit multiple reviews for the same book.
• Goodreads Review Data: On the book details page, users are able to see the average rating and number of ratings the work has received from Goodreads.

API Access

Book Reviews API allows developers access to Book Reviews data in order to help other websites or applications that deal with books be more personalized, social and engaging.

API methods

/api/<isbn> - where <isbn> is a 10 digit ISBN number. This GET request returns a JSON response containing the book's title, author, publication date, ISBN number, review count, and average score. Example format:

{
    "title": "Memory",
    "author": "Doug Lloyd",
    "year": 2015,
    "isbn": "1632168146",
    "review_count": 28,
    "average_score": 5.0
}