LibraryAssistant

This is a little pet project that helps me manage my reading and gives me something to experiment with.

I read a lot and get almost all of my books from the library. As much as I love my local library (hi, Islington 👋🏽), its website leaves a lot to be desired. It was also getting a bit silly how often I'd look up a book on both Goodreads (to check reviews and add to my to-read shelf) and the library catalogue (to see if the book's even stocked), so I thought I should try to automate that process.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'library_assistant'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install library_assistant

Usage

See .env.example for the required .env setup. The Goodreads credentials involved are an API key, a user ID, and the name of a shelf associated with that user ID.

All LibraryAssistant methods involve first getting the most recently added books (up to 20) on the Goodreads shelf specified in your .env:

• LibraryAssistant.grab_a_book returns the first book found in the Islington library catalogue. See library-assistant-cli for how I use it, which was how this project started.

• LibraryAssistant.generate_and_process_book_requests returns processed book requests with their library search results. By default, only the ones with books found are returned. You can pass the method the following options:

  • include_all: true: To get back all processed book requests, including ones with bookless search results.

  • desired_book_count: {number}: To attempt to get at least that many processed book requests with library books found, looking beyond the first 20 Goodsreads books if needed. See library-assistant-web for an example.

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/maloneyl/library_assistant.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.