My own book repository

Welcome to Manan’s book repository. Explore our collection of 1000s of books - right at your fingertips.

About the problem

This is my solution for CS50’s project 1 - Books. This project was started after watching the first 5 lectures. So all I really knew at this point was the basics of HTML, CSS and Flask. Along with a basic idea of how to work with databases.

Note that I did not know JavaScript at this point. Some features of the website could have been a lot better if I had known JS.

Implementation and features

• Log in / Sign up - The server will remember you and your preferences
• Contains 5000 pre-loaded books
• Accesses the summary, photos and ratings of any book using the GoodReads API.
• You can add books to your personal library to access later. Also, books added to your personal library are automatically marked as read.
• search for books using the search bar.

Some common problems

Since this was my first attempt at making a website, I did lots of stuff wrong. But some of the problems were also solved creatively using the limited tools at my disposal. Here are a few of them:

• The total number of books is constant - I only have support for 5000 books for now.
• The server caches image URLs as it sees them. But, loading the page for the first time is time-consuming and often takes 3-4 minutes (The home page has ~50 books). Subsequent visits are much faster.
• A lot of pages are reloaded completely when only a small part of the page changes. For example, when you click on a book, the summary and reviews should be rendered as tabs in a single static page, but they are separate pages. (This is difficult to achieve without JavaScript though).
• In the reviews sections, the icon for stars needed to be generated dynamically (based on the actual rating). This was difficult to do with HTML and CSS, but I managed to generate HTML code for these stars on the server and sent it along while rendering the page and it worked like a charm!
• The database password and your app’s secret is easily exposed in the server code. Consider use environment variables to improve its security

Installing

Requirements

• Python 3
• pip
• PostgreSQL (SQLAlchemy)

Installing python dependencies using pip

Once you have installed the requirements, install all the dependencies using

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pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Setting up a PostgreSQL database

• Set up a PostgreSQL server on your local server and configure it. This tutorial might help.

  Note your name and password.

• Create a db with the your name (dbname)
• Now once you have created an account navigate to server.py and reset_db.py, modify the DATABASE URI and replace <name>, <password> and <dbname> accordingly:

  1	app.config["SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI"] = 'postgresql://<name>:<password>@localhost/<dbname>'

  Populating the database with books

  Run the restart_db.sh script to fill your database for the first time (You only need to do this once whenever you set up a new database).

Running the server

You are good to go! Run the server using

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python3 server.py

Contributing

Feel free to contribute features / point out errors. Fork my repository and make a pull request.
I promise I’ll have a look!