8th Light Application Coding Challenge

This command line application should allow you to:

• Type in a query and display a list of 5 books matching that query.
• Each item in the list should include the book's author, title, and publishing company.
• A user should be able to select a book from the five displayed to save to a “Reading List”
• View a “Reading List” with all the books the user has selected from their queries -- this is a local reading list and not tied to Google Books' account features.

Steps to Create this CLI:

1. npm init to create a package.json file where we will add our dependencies used for the project
2. install dependencies:

• npm i node-fetch for fetch calls to API (see documentation below)
• npm i minimist - argument parser (see documentation below)
• npm i chalk - to add some flare and color to your command line interface! (see documentation below)

3. create bin directory: mkdir bin
4. cd bin
5. inside bin directory, create file for the command line prompt we will be using: touch gbooks-cli
6. type into command line at root chmod +x bin/gbooks-cli - this is a "shebang" and will allow us to execute the commands in our command line for this application
7. type npm link in the root; this will "symlink the binary file to the system path, making it accessible from anywhere by running gbooks-cli " (this came from the first source listed below)

How to Clone and Use In Local Environment:

1. Open your command line, navigate to the folder where you would like to store this project, and type in the following to clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/t-keazirian/google-books-cli.git

2. npm i to install the dependencies used in this project

See below for detailed command line instructions...

Help:

• in command line prompt, type gbooks-cli help for a list of the commands this application uses and how to use them properly

To Search for Books:

• in command line prompt, type gbooks-cli search --keyword yourSearchTermHere (changing yourSearchTerm here to the book title, keyword, or author you are searching for)
• if your search includes spaces, please use quotation marks

Example with One Word Search: gbooks-cli search --keyword ferrets

Example with Quotation Marks: gbooks-cli search --keyword "stephen king"

• Command line will display each book's ID, title, author, and publisher

• If you would like to display the Title and Description only, change the method in searchForBooks.js from searchOptions.fullSearch(data) to searchOptions.titleDescription(data) on line 41

• You can also feel free to add other methods to the searchOptions object in searchForBooks.js to display different data from the API depending on your needs

To Save a Book To Reading List:

• locate and copy (highlight the ID and use cmd+c on Mac, ctrl+c on Windows) the id of the book you would like to save to your reading list (the id will be in your search results in blue)
• in command line prompt, type gbooks-cli save --id yourBookId (changing yourBookId to the ID you have selected from the search list using cmd+v on Mac, ctrl+v on Windows to paste the id)
• your new book's information will save to your reading-list.txt file

To Print Your Reading List:

• in your command line prompt, type gbooks-cli list
• all books saved to your reading list will display in your command line

Helpful Resources:

• Creating a Real World CLI - this was the most helpful resource which taught me most of what I did for this project
• Google Books API Documentation
• Node.js fs documentation
• Command line app example
• NPM Minimist Documentation
• NPM Chalk Documentation

New Things Learned:

• how to create a command line application
• using shebang in my project
• using npm link mentioned above
• creating different commands and flags and executing all in the command line

To Add in the Future:

• Testing