Since somewhere last year I've been working on and off on bookwyrm, a cli-based program that takes some input that can identify a book (i.e. authors, title, year of release, etc.) and then searches through a variety of sources. Found items that matches the input are (will be) presented in a menu alΓ‘ mutt, where the users can select which items to download.

The cause of this project being my start in uni, and the requirements of text books that costs a lot of money. I found out of a few specific sources that more likely than not had these books available as pdfs, and it felt only natural wanting a way to get these books via the command line. And here we are.

I began writing the project in Python. And while progress was fast, it felt like the program lacked structure and I constantly remade the data structures. After a while I started to rewrite the progress I've made in C++, and while I still have some stuff left, I feel like I've written some better code.

Project history aside, I'm creating this thread in hopes of spawning some discussion about design, both project- and usage-wise. Best case scenario I will end up with a specification far ahead of v1.0.0.

Thus far, it's been decided that the program takes arguments POSIX-wise, after which a menu (or a list, more like) alike mutt's will open and present all found items, and properties about them. The user can then mark which items to download. The list will update as items are found.

Project-wise, an item (pdf, dvju, epub, etc.) has exact, non-exact and misc properties. The first group is anything that can be represented with an integer/enum (year, file format, etc.). Non-exact properties are titles, authors, etc.; stuff that can be miss-entered. This is all stored in strings and matched fuzzily. The misc group is for anything else. (Currently it only contains the ISBN(s) of the item.)

Progress-wise, I've thus implemented argument parsing, logging, and item matching. Since I enjoyed it when the project was written in Python, I've decided to port fuzzywuzzy (project here; there is some bug-smashing to be done).

Initially, I planned to write support for sources in C++, but I think scripting these might be a better idea. This way, the C++ part is the "front-end" that handles user input and filters items, whereas the scripts feeds the program found items. It also allows a user to easily add support for more sources (including those that cannot be pushed upstream). Is this a good idea? (Keeping the front-end this simple, I might one day rewrite it in C).

So: any comments? Is there anything you think I should plan to implement? Is there anything I should change?

Bookwyrm can be found here.

Thanks,
Tmplt