BrckBook

book recommendation application

Comment

BRCKBOOK - Track, Discover, and Recommend books

Inspiration

When someone asks you what books you recommend, often you only tell them the most recent books that you remember. There may be other books that you also like just as much but have not seen in a while. Our project provides an online library for a user to keep track of the books that they have read in addition to getting suggested books from google.

What it does

The application allows users to find books, list information about books and recommend similar books to users through the use of Google's Book API. Additionally you will eventually be able to see what your friends are reading

How we built it

Front End: React.js Back End: Express.js, MongoDB Mockup: Figma

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge that the team ran into was related to the front end technologies. Most of our team members did not have as much experience with React/css, so getting the project to look and feel similar to our mockup was relatively hard.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of the code implementation that we were able to get done in this short time frame. Having to configure all sorts of API keys to utilize MongoDB and Google Books API can be tedious and time consuming to setup. With regards to notable achievements, the recommendations via Google Books is functional, and the figma mockup covers almost all areas that we wanted to have.

What we learned

We learned about technologies that we do not normally use and produced a relatively great full stack application within the allotted time. We also learned that it is quite hard to match the css to be like the mockup.

What's next for BrckBook

If we had more time we would fully implement the screens designed in the figma mockup such as the Genre, Friends, Profile, and the individualized Book pages. We would also like to refine the Search option to contain a drop down and flesh out possible randomization within our suggestion bars. With regards to our API usage, we would possibly want to investigate other book API’s such as Amazon’s Product Advertising API, or private book databases to allow more flexibility with our search capability. One feature that we wanted to implement was searching by genre, something that the Google API did not allow.

Share this project:

Updates