Question

Firstly I know I have some reading to do with this but I was looking to see what would be a rails way of going about this

I am going to build a simple book library where you can add books, but rather than manually input all the info via a long form, it would be nice if i can just enter the ISBN number and retrieve all the info via an api. I believe Google data has such an api? or does anyone use anything else? This will be my first time using an api so any advice/resources that would assist me would be greatly appreciated

Answer 1

There seems to be a service providing exactly what you are looking for – http://isbndb.com/docs/api/20-structure.html

Rails Code:

require 'open-uri'
class BookController < ApplicationController
  def searchbook
     resp = open("http://isbndb.com/api/books.xml?access_key=#{YOUR_API_KEY}&results=details&index1=isbn&value1=#{params[:isbn]}")
     doc = Nokogiri.XML(resp.read)
     # ... process response here
  end
end

Read about nokogiri’s parsing capabilities here
As for what an api actually is and how it works i think this is a good starting point.