📚 About booktrack-cli

booktrack-cli is a booktracking application for commandline enthusiasts. One focus of the development is an extensive availability of reading statistics.

Features

✔️ The complete functionality like adding books, viewing and filtering the library and so on is available on the commandline interface.

✔️ The libraries are stored in an open, human readable format (JSON) without proprietary dependencies.

✔️ Your data belongs to you: no communication with any server is necessary.

Getting Started

Here is a short introduction how to use booktrack-cli.

# Add a book with title only
./booktrack-cli -l ~/my_lib.json add -t "Clean Code"

# Add some books with title and author
./booktrack-cli -l ~/my_lib.json add -t "Refactoring" -a "Martin Fowler"
./booktrack-cli -l ~/my_lib.json add -t "Clean Code" -a "Robert C. Martin"
./booktrack-cli -l ~/my_lib.json add -t "Effective Modern C++" -a "Scott Meyers"

# List all available books in the given library
./booktrack-cli -l ~/my_lib.json list

# List all books in the given library with a filter (case insensitive)
./booktrack-cli -l ~/my_lib.json list --author "martin fowler"
./booktrack-cli -l ~/my_lib.json list --title "Clean Code"
./booktrack-cli -l ~/my_lib.json list --shelf "programming"

# Delete a book from the given library by title
./booktrack-cli -l ~/my_lib.json delete --by-title "Effective Modern C++"

# Delete a book from the given library by the book id
./booktrack-cli -l ~/my_lib.json delete --by-id 2

# Edit the title of the book from the given library with the book id 4
./booktrack-cli -l ~/my_lib.json edit --by-id 4 --title "Introduction to Algorithms"

You can see a full list of commandline options below.

booktrack_cli
Usage: ./booktrack-cli [OPTIONS] SUBCOMMAND

Options:
  -h,--help                   Print this help message and exit
  --version                   Display program version information and exit
  -l,--library TEXT REQUIRED  Set the path of the library

Subcommands:
  add                         Add a book to the library
  delete                      Delete a book from the library
  list                        List books in the library
  statistics                  Show statistics for loaded library
  details                     Show details for a book
  edit                        Edit a book in the library

Notes

1. Do not consider the Book ID to be immutable: if one deletes a book entry right in the middle of the library, there will be a gap in the series of book IDs. In future program versions, there will be some "housekeeping" mechanism, which reassigns the book IDs. Invoking the list subcommand will never change the book ID and can therefore be used to get the valid state of the book IDs.

2. Filter options are exclusive: this means, that currently one can only filter the library with the list subcommand by using one of the options at the same time, e.g. --author or --title but not both. Also note, that the filter is case insensitive but compares the whole given text.

3. Empty filters are handled as non-existent: if you add a filter option to the list subcommand but leave the value empty, e.g. list -a "" then this filter will be ignored. This has the effect, that you cannot filter for books in the library which do not have a shelf for example.

Development

Please refer to DEVELOPMENT.md for information about building booktrack-cli from source. Any contribution is appreciated.

Acknowledgements

booktrack-cli was written by the help of some awesome open source projects (in alphabetical order):

• ClangFormat: for code formatting with the built-in Chromium style
• CLI11: a modern and feature rich command line parsing library
• CMake: the tool of choice to build booktrack-cli
• fmt: A modern formatting library
• JSON for Modern C++: making the use of JSON in C++ real fun