A Django app which uses the Google Books API to allow a to user search for and see information about books.

This has been quite the challenge for me - I have little more than beginner Python, and have never used it for the web. I've also never written a Django app before, so this has been a huge learning curve!

To install:

• clone this repo
• in your terminal, run:

> brew install python3 #if you don't already have python3
> python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt

To run locally:

> python3 manage.py runserver

To test:

> python3 manage.py test

I've provided a .env.example file in the bookbrowse folder - to use the app you will need to rename this to .env and add your own environment variables.

I do not know much Python, and as I had a short timescale in which to build this project I did not feel comfortable building a server in 'vanilla' Python. I don't understand the language well enough to know when I would be making fundamental mistakes that would leave the site vulnerable or just broken.

I soon came across Django as an option - having little idea of how I would get a Python site deployed on Heroku, I looked into their docs and found an example deployment which used Python with Django. Researching Django, I found that it was popular and well documented, and decided that as I was on unfamiliar ground, it made sense to follow a route that had been clearly documented with plenty of examples.

Although I feel like a spent a large amount of my time on DevOps and getting the framework deployed, Django takes care of a lot of the lower level processes that I did not feel comfortable writing myself, and allowed me to write the part I did understand: making an API call and templating the result on the page.

In retrospective, I wish I had spent more time researching other framework options. Django is well-documented, but it contained features I didn't need like a database and as a fairly opinionated framework, I found that I had to jump through a lot of hoops to get the app deployed.

I've written a few tests with the inbuilt Django testing library. There seem to be many different options for testing and I would like to learn more about them, but for now I've had to settle for some simple test cases (literally, I used the SimpleTestCase subclass...). These tests check my util function works, my url paths work and my html templates render correctly.

I've used the BEM class naming convention to style my CSS.

• Search by author
• Search by genre
• Filter / sort functionality
• 'Favourite' books
• Autocomplete on search