Vedabase — CLI Project!
I must admit, this was a journey of many blocks and long hours trying to figure out the best way to implement my code from scratch. Nevertheless, it was a really good experience and definitely a big learning curve for me.
I wanted to create an application that displays the three most popular books from His Divine Grace AC Bhaktivedanta Swami — a spiritual teacher who spread the Kṛṣṇa Consciousness movement in the western world during the 1970’s. I thought this would be a great way to express two things that are very important to me — his teachings and coding.
Firstly, I knew that I would need 3 files with a class each and so started with the Vedabase class. The Vedabase class initializes with a title of a book and includes a class variable @@all containing all instances of a book. Secondly, I would need a Scraper class that scrapes the titles of each book from the following website =>(https://www.vedabase.io/en/library/). I also scraped the introductions of each book from a different page through the same website. Thirdly, creating my CLI class that allows the user to interact with the application.
Within the CLI class, I called upon the titles from the Scraper class to create instances within the Vedabase class. I then called upon the .all method from the Vedabase class to retrieve all the instances and listed them in a method. I also created a method to update the instances with an introduction attribute that is displayed on the 2nd level of the application.
Going back to my Scraper class, I was constantly going back and forth as I could not seem to find the perfect formatting for it when it is displayed in the terminal. I also had an option to scrape 3 pages with a title & introduction or 4 pages, one with the list of books and 3 with an introduction each. I chose to settle with scraping 4 pages.
In the CLI class, I created different methods which “puts” the titles for the user to choose from, a message for invalid inputs, an option to return to the main menu and/or leave the application. Once the user leaves the application, they receive a message to visit a website if they would like to know more or purchase the books.
This project was definitely tricky at times but I’m grateful for the process and all that I have learnt along the way.
