My first project is a CLI Gem titled ‘best_sellers’. The requirements of the project are to provide a CLI app that accesses data from an outside source like another web site. It also must go a layer deep to allow the user to choose an option, and must include all of the Ruby essentials learned in previous weeks.
The week before the project, I was extremely stressed and worried that I wouldn’t be able to complete a project at all. With the help and support of my amazing cohort leads I was able to pull it together and build a functional CLI app. It was nice to implement everything I have learned and make something of my own come to life.
Once the app opens, it greets you and then lists this weeks best selling books from the USA Today website. It allows you to select a book and then provides details of the book such as the author, genre, and summary. From there you are able to select another book or exit. You can view a quick walk-through here: best_sellers cli
All of the information is scraped from USA Today using Nokogiri. This was honestly one of my favorite parts of the project. It was challenging at first and sometimes took a while, but I liked tinkering around with the different elements from the website and drilling it down to select exactly what I needed. Using ‘pry’ was my best friend in this process as sometimes it took a lot of tries to get what I needed.
I’m happy with the way the project turned out am thinking about adding other features at some point. I’m excited for future projects and for whats to come at Flatiron.