My Personal Project

Who, What, and Why?

My application will be a book tracker for the user to add, rate, link, and sort books they have read. This project is designed for anyone who is an active reader. It may also be useful to students who would like to use it for keeping track of the online journal articles they have read, or textbooks to keep track of. I am interested in this project because I would like a simple application to record my reading history. Not only would it be helpful to look back on, but it would be fun to see my past ratings for the books.

User Stories

• I want to be able to add a book to my book-list and record the start and end date
• I want to be able to view my reading history
• I want to be able to rate a book
• I want to mark a book as read or unread
• I want to be able to link a PDF or website to the corresponding book or article
• I want to be able to remove a book from my book-list
• I want to be able to save my book-list to file (if I choose)
• I want to be able to load my book-list from file (if I choose)
• I want to be able to add multiple books to a book list
• I want to be prompted with the option to load data from file when the application starts and prompted with the option to save data to file when the application ends

Instructions

• You can generate the first required action related to the user story "adding multiple Xs to a Y" by pressing "Add Book" after entering a book title and other book attributes
• You can generate the second required action related to the user story "adding multiple Xs to a Y" by selecting a book in the list and pressing "Remove Book" to delete a book
• You can locate my visual component by adding a book, which displays an image
• You can save the state of my application by pressing "Save Booklist"
• You can reload the state of my application by pressing "Load Booklist"

For Future Reference

If I were to improve this project, I would add a few exception classes to handle the different exceptions that could arise when running the program. For example, entering random characters as a book rating would not make sense, so creating an exception, such as a "RatingException" could help. In addition, using an iterator for the BookList class may be a good refactor change. This could simplify the code, since iterating over the book-list is repeated several times. Lastly, I would also break down the GUI class into several different classes, perhaps for the buttons and text boxes. Currently, the single class is slightly long, so spreading it out in a few classes would enhance readability.