Find my Book
2011 / Find my book
is an ongoing personal project of mine that started in March 2011.
After seeing the power of GoogleDoc functions like ImportHTML, I
realized the same things could be accomplished with PHP cURL functions.
The project started out with the intention of cross referencing college
text book websites, Craigslist, personal student textbook selling
websites, and Google in order to find the true "cheapest price" of a
book. The project is largely unfinished and I really only use it to
play around with PHP. All code was written by me unless otherwise
stated in the function head comment.
Things I Liked:
- Exploring the functions of cURL and picking apart websites to gather information
- Combining this data into a database and comparing it opened my mind to how powerful similar content aggregators can be
- Taking advantage of functions to eliminate duplicate code (although right now there is a lot of duplicates simply for testing)
Relevant PHP Sample Files:
- findmybook/index.php - main driver of the program
- findmybook/funct_google.php - sends in search result queries to Goggle and cross references them with the database
- findmybook/funct_all.php - functions primarily for cURL, most of these were not written by me -- just modified
- findmybook/global_functions.php - function to determine object types according to a logic I created
Features Implemented
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