jamisonordway/book_search

Book Search

This app is deployed on Heroku!

Book Search uses the Google Books API to find volumes which match a given search query.

Currently, the search functionality returns a list of books.

Each item in this list includes an image, title, author(s), publisher, and a link to learn more about the volume.

Contributing

To interact with this project locally, clone the repo and make sure you have the lastest version of Node installed.

Install dependencies with npm install

Run the server with node server.js

Now you can view the site on localhost:3000!

Pull requests, new issues, and feature requests are all welcome.

My approach to building this app

• I started by exploring the Google Books API and testing out calls in Postman

• Once I understood what data to expect from the JSON response I created a function with vanilla JS

• I started working with index.html in VS Code's live server to create a view with some basic styling

• I connected my getBooks() function to the view using a script tag

• I then installed Express and hit a snag-- my server worked, but the search script wasn't running from the view

• I wondered if there was a way to push to Heroku without setting up a server and quickly learned this isn't possible

• I reverted to Express and EJS, researching and troubleshooting client side scripting

• I researched this issue and found that I needed to serve the script as a static file in server.js

• After adding app.use(express.static(path.join(__dirname, 'client'))) I was back to the same functionality on localhost:3000 that I had in VS Code's live server

• I reorganized my file tree and deployed to Heroku.

Next steps

• Improve styling with Bootstrap or similar library

• Research how to test client-side API calls and write tests

• Improve how the API call handles missing "Publisher" data