Ruby Project — Phase 3 of Academy Xi’s Software Engineering Course
I must admit, this has been a tough phase of the course for me. Sure, it started off easy in the initial weeks as we were learning Ruby’s basic concepts which were similar to concepts to Javascript which was covered in Phase 1 of the course and the labs were a piece of cake. After the initial weeks, it was like I was dropped into the deep end of the pool and told to swim in the sea of code! The labs got challenging real fast. As we went into SQL and Active Record, it was quite challenging comprehending ORM mapping and relational database in such a short amount of time. Before I knew it, the project was here! On to the project…
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We were asked to create a Command Line Interface (CLI) app for this project. I decided to create an app which allows a user to find books based on genres. The user is also able to add user and login to add books to their favourites. For this project, I use Nokogiri to scrap the required genres from the “Good Reads” website. This returns a list of genres to display to the user. A roadblock I encountered was that as the website was created using REACT, I had difficulty scraping further info about the books. As such, I had to use ‘net/http’ to consume the API from the Google Books API.
On completion of the project, I had a basic working app that fulfilled the project requirements. Is there much improvement to be made? For sure. There always is. Even in the most advance of apps, there are always newer and better features that can be added along the way. There are plenty of further options to add features and I will continue working on my app to better it and add on further knowledge in my learning journey.
