Linde002::PHP

As I continue to try and catalog my book collection I keep hitting some walls. One of these is that ISBNdb.org catalogs mostly English editions of books and their corresponding ISBN’s. Seeing that my library is only 60-70% in english this leaves me with a lot of (dutch) editions that I cannot process using ISBNdb.org.

Luckily for me ISBNdb.org isn’t the only dealer on the block. WorldCat has their xISBN service that performs roughly the same as ISBNdb.org and they have a larger collection of ‘foreign’ editions in their database. If that doesn’t work I can use the ‘ThingISBN’ service from LibraryThing to retrieve a list of other editions for my selected book, get an english edition and then search using that ISBN. To use these in PHP i’ve created wrappers for both Services. I also migrated the documentation for ISBNDBService. Information for all of these services can be found at: http://webservices.linde002.nl/

The chatter about PHP’s SPL has been picking up recently which is a good thing. SPL has been available for quite some time and a lot of people still don’t know about the awesome features it brings to the table. The problem I have however is that a lot of examples about the iterator interface don’t show off the power that it brings to the table.

For our example we are going to take a look at a simplified version of my ISBNDB wrapper which uses this technique to transparantly page the results received from the webservice. (more…)

I was working on indexing my bookcollection this weekend and while looking at the stacks of books I had lying around I decided I wasn’t, under any circumstance, going to enter all the data from those books (ISBN/ISBN13, Author, Title, Summary, Publisher, etc) by hand.

So after googling around a bit I found ISBNDB.com which is, in essence, google for books. They crawl the internet searching for bookrelated data and then indexing it themselves. They really do store alot of information about books and cross index that so you can technically search for the categories an author fits in and then search other authors that fit in those same categories.

The best part is though, that they publish all this information through a free webservice. So I wrote a wrapper for this webservice that exposes all the methods and results used that can be used in PHP. If you are interested you can download it here. Documentation here.

Code after the jump:
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