Overview

Book Tracker is a web app I created as a replacement to the spreadsheet I have been using to record all the books I have read since 2008. I wanted to create something with a clean and easy-to-use user interface that would allow me to not only record the books I have read, but also analyze my reading habits across the past decade.

Besides creating and modifying book entries, users can also search and sort their list of books. Other features include the ability to upload a CSV file to add multiple book entries at once and an analytics page with data visualization and statistics of the user's reading habits.

How the App Works

I used a tech stack consisting of PHP and MySQL on the back end, and jQuery on the front end with C3.js/ D3.js for data visualization. The live version of the app is hosted on Heroku.

Since this was my first web app, I chose to use technology I had used before, including Apache and PHP. I decided not to use any web frameworks or libraries, such as React or Laravel, in order to understand the basics, though I quickly understood why such technologies can be helpful. This project was a learning experience that allowed me to dip my toes into web development.