GoodReads Random Book Selector

This is useful for anyone that doesn't know what to read next. If you have GoodReads, you probably have hundreds of books on your to-read bookshelf, and may want to roll the dice, if you will, to randomly select your next book. If you don't have GoodReads, you can randomly select a book off a good friend's book shelf.

How it works

The only input is the user-id and the name of the book shelf to randomly select from. You will also need a key, which you can obtain from the GoodReads website. You'll have to edit the script to put your key in. https://www.goodreads.com/api

If you don't have scala...

The easiest way to install it is with homebrew. Or check out other ways to download on the scala website.

brew update
brew install scala

Compiling

From the terminal run

scalac GoodReads-BookSelector/bookSelector.scala

Running

From terminal run:

scala bookSelector

And respond to prompts:

1. a user-id, which can be a user-id from any GoodReads user. To get a user-id, simply go to your profile, or another person's profile and the id will be in the web address. For example, the address of my profile is: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4333445-arielle and my user-id is 4333445.
2. the name of a book shelf from the profile of the user. Most people have a to-read book shelf, but you may also be interested in selecting a random book from your classics book shelf. the world is your oyster.