Pybites Platform

Scrape best programming books

Level: Advanced (score: 4)

For this bite, you are going to scrape the books from 100 Best Programming Books of All Time. Only include the ones with the word python in their titles (case insensitive match).

Since the page gets generated via JavaScript, we will be providing you with the source and the code to load it up and bundle it into a BeautifulSoup object for you. All you will have to do is scrape the necessary data and create Book objects from it.

The Book class

Create a class for the books which should have the following class variables:

• title: string as it appears on the page
• author: string should be entered as lastname, firstname
• year: four digit integer year that the book was published
• rank: integer rank to be updated once the books have been sorted
• rating: float as indicated on the page

When you print a Book it should be formatted as follows:

[001] Python Tricks (2017)
      Bader, Dan 4.74

The load_data() function

With this function you will load the data from the html_file. This is where you will call the _get_soup() function that has been provided for you.

• Loads the soup object
• Extract the information from the soup object required to create the Book instances
• Returns a sorted list of Book objects

NOTE: If any of the required attributes is missing from any of the books, dump the book and don't include it.

SORTING: Books should be sorted descending by rating and ascending by year, title, and then by author's last name; in that order. When sorting the titles, make sure to sort them with either .title(), .lower(), or .upper() but take care not to change the original.

RANKING: After the books have been sorted, the rank of each book needs to be updated to indicate this new sorting order.The Book object with the highest rating should be first and go down from there.

The display_books() function

With this function, you are simply going to print the specified books to the console. You will need to implement the following variables:

• books: list of all the sorted Books
• limit: integer that indicates how many books to return, defaults to 10
• year: integer indicating the oldest year to include, i.e. 2017, defaults to None

If it's called with more books than are in the list, it should only display the max books that are available and not fail.

Sample call to display_books():

display_books(books, limit=5, year=2017)

[001] Python Tricks (2017)
      Bader, Dan 4.74
[002] Mastering Deep Learning Fundamentals with Python (2019)
      Wilson, Richard 4.7
[006] Python Programming (2019)
      Fedden, Antony Mc 4.68
[007] Python Programming (2019)
      Mining, Joseph 4.68
[009] A Smarter Way to Learn Python (2017)
      Myers, Mark 4.66

NOTE: Notice that the books ranking 003, 004, and 005 are not listed. That's because I specified that the oldest date to include as 2017 and those books were older then that. Another point to note, is that books ranking 006 and 007 both have the same rating, book titles, and release dates but they were sorted by the author's last name!

This is an advanced bite, so don't despair! Keep at it and you will emerge victorious! I look forward to seeing your submissions in the forum!