Boiler Books

Introduction:

Have you ever had 10 tabs open looking for a reasonably priced textbook that you may not even use in class? Having to click on multiple website to find a textbook can be grueling and time consuming for busy students on a budget. Therefore, we created a website to do the work for us. Introducing: Boiler Books! One website that will display the best textbook prices from various popular websites.

Challenges we ran into:

As we were creating this project, we created 5 different APIs. However, only one, Google Books, was successful. We were unable to use the eBay API because their API server was down and their endpoints were incompatible. With Rakuten, we found that the Japanese ISBNs were not compatible and Walmart did not have an ISBN parameter. With Amazon, we were unable to obtain the access key for the API because we would have needed to wait up to five business days.

Accomplishments:

As beginners in all things related to JavaScript, XML/JSon, APIs, and HTML/CSS, we were able to use them to extract price data for our interactive website that we created from scratch using HTML.

What we learned:

We learned what servers and frontend/backedns are, how to call and integrate APIs into JavaScript, and how to implement JavaScript code into HTML files.

Future Plans:

We plan on executing a wide variety of APIs that will allow us to gather more price data for certain textbooks. We also plan to use students' individual Career Login accounts to link their schedule and required textbooks to the website.