Book Database

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[edit] Book Database

BernardPeek and AlexMcLintock are creating a book database of all science fiction books in existence. This will be used as the core of a more expanded Being Published Database, Received Review Books Database, a Books out being reviewed database, and finally a Reviews Database.

At the moment we are looking at a book database with just an author (or creator) table, and a "Title" table.

JohnBray wonders how this work can build on the ISFDB database at http://isfdb.tamu.edu/. Currently ISFDB only indexes by author name or book # number which is not ideal. He also notices that the author section of Wikipedia at http://www.wikipedia.org Wikipedia is expanding rapidly, and it would be foolish to compete with that. Bernard Peek has now taken a snapshot from some of his own booklist and ported it to MySQL. The snapshot includes the author and title data. There is more data available, for instance on specific editions of the titles. The key questions is what is the data needed for? That determines the final structure of the database. The database has to have a purpose in order to persuade people to put in the work needed to keep it current. A comprehensive database will be much more work than one or two people can manage. Even just taking the existing ISFDB database and adding to it will be a significant amount of work. <p>

[edit] Tools

  • Apache web server with mod_perl, MySQL 3.something
  • Class::DBI - this is the main database abstraction layer so that the programmers dont have to write SQL. As components it includes Class:DBI::Pager (for doing the "page one of 20" links) and Class::DBI::Joins (for more complex relationships between tables)
  • slashcode - the software which most of DiverseBooks is written in.
  • http://siesta.unixbeard.net -


You can see some prototype pages thrown together here: 

http://news.diversebooks.com/test/listauthors.pl

http://news.diversebooks.com/test/listtitles.pl



[edit] Missing Features

I want to start off by creating a system by which I can

  • a) record new books being published in the UK. (US Books are catered for elsewhere, such as on the ISFDB) This is an important feature missing from the DiverseBooks.com site.
  • b) Record books which are received for review.
  • c) Record books which are out for review.
  • d) record books which have been reviewed.

Here are some more missing features:

  • Nothing to link join authors to their individual pages. (eg through the see also table?)

[edit] Bugs

This should only list bugs in the existing code - not missing features.

  • There is no sorting. This is broken. This kind of makes the paging difficult to work with.
  • The pager is wildly innefficient. How innefficient I don't know. but it doesn't use LIMIT !
Also see http://bookshelved.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ScienceFiction (and click on the ScienceFiction title there). They don't have a lot of SF there yet, but since the death of WoytexWiki (which had ads anyway) this may be the best candidate for an SF book wiki.

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