Book Finder

Notes on the Book Finder app for my interview with Sandia National Labs.

Preparation

I'd never worked with the Google Book API before, so I spent time reading about it and experimenting with it, to learn how to perform a search with the Google Book API. This was done in a separate, console project.

Architectual changes

I'm going to create another project to put the Google Book API code into

The basic app

The basic instrunctions were to prepare an app that allowed a user to search for books either by author or title. Naturally, other options could also be done, but for now I'm going to focus upon those two

A Google Book API NuGet Package!

I discovered that NuGet has an API for Google Books! Its called Google.Apis.Books.v1 and can be found here.

Follow-up for the NuGet Google.Apis.Books.v1

After spending a couple of days trying to work with this NuGet package, I've decided to adandon it. It doesn't seem to work well. My guess is it was written for older versions of the .NET Framework, whereas I'm using .NET 6.

The approach I'll follow now

I'll have two pages, one for searching by author, the other for searching by title. I'm chosing this approach because at the moment I'm not sure how to restrict the search by one and not the other, if the user enters both author and title.

Working on searching by Author

I've begun the work in a separate feature branch. However, I'm created a PR and merged the feature branch back into main. Then deleted the feature branch. Will need to resume work on this tomorrow.

Another change for Author

I've decided that I will reference the Book API from the MVC Controller, rather than the view.

Future versions/Issues

• In a later version allowing the user to search both by author and title would be useful. In order to do this I'll need to get more information from this link
• This does not display all of the details that could be returned by the Google Book API, however I was concerned that I'd leave it broken, so I decided to stop while it's working
• There is no unit testing involved, that should be done
• The auxillary project, BookApi, is not well named. It really is a library function that uses the facade pattern for accessing the Google Book API
• Although I did get a Google Developer key to access private Google Book collections, I am not familiar with how to store secrets in GitHub. Storing secrets in a public repo is a bad idea, so that functionality will have to wait until I learn about GitHub secrets