Liyas Thomas

Posted on Jul 12, 2019 • Edited on Dec 11, 2020

I created an easy way to browse & find Google books (today is my birthday 🎈)

#showdev #webdev #javascript

Books 📚

Find books from Google Play Books

Feel free to contribute on GitHub

I was casually surfing online and saw an article about Google Books API. I read the docs, and decided to create a minimal, lightweight and beautiful web app to browse & find books using Google Books API.

That's why I created Books 📚.

Books is an open-source project which make use of Google Books API.

Some of its features are:

Search book by title, author, category, genre etc.
Minimal and elegant UI.
PWA support.
Dark mode. Can't live without it!

Bonus: 🌗 I also added dark mode so that your eyes won't hurt during night!

Demo 🚀

Feel free to contribute on GitHub

I'm writing a book: De-Coding The Passion Project 📘

Liyas Thomas ・ May 24 '20

#books #productivity #startup #watercooler

If you want a heads up on my next projects, or just want to chat about the web, life and happiness make sure to follow me @liyasthomas on Twitter 💙. If any of my projects helped you please consider making a donation.

Latest comments (51)

Charlot • Apr 1 '20

This is so cool!

Liyas Thomas • Apr 1 '20

Thank you ❤️
You can find the source code of the project in my GitHub. May that help/inspire you.

Luis Rey • Sep 27 '19

Hi, you did a great job! Happy birthday btw (I know, your birthday is not today).
Are you using the free endpoint without any API key? Or are you using an API key with the 1000 free request per day?

Liyas Thomas • Sep 27 '19 • Edited

Glad you liked it!
I use free endpoint without API key

You might want to checkout my other posts or my latest project postwoman.io github.com/liyasthomas/postwoman

Fernando B 🚀 • Jul 13 '19

Wow another great project! Happy Belated birthday!

Liyas Thomas • Jul 13 '19

Hi there my friend ✨
Glad you liked this. You should definitely check out my new tutorial on How to create your own custom URL shortener in 10 minutes for free & deploy to GitHub 🚀

Liyas Thomas • Jul 12 '19

Glad you liked it. Check out my other projects on GitHub ✨

Wiktor Olejniczak • Jul 12 '19

Wow, The UI is really awesome! Everything feels so smooth and well-animated 👏 I took a look at your other projects, and wow, they're really inspiring 🤩

The only thing that slightly falls behind here is the shadow animation, a bit laggy 🙁

Oh, and happy birthday!

Liyas Thomas • Jul 12 '19

Thanks for the appreciation ✨
I'll fix all issues you've faced in next commit.

Doaa Mahely • Jul 12 '19

It's so pretty I love it 🥰
Happy birthday!

Liyas Thomas • Jul 12 '19

Thank you. God bless you 💫

Pavan Bawdane • Jul 12 '19

That's an awesome design Liyas. I looked at your Github projects. They are phenomenal.

Liyas Thomas • Jul 12 '19

Your words are inspiring. I promise I'll do more projects and write about it here more frequently 💫

Ahmed Musallam • Jul 12 '19

That's Awesome!

I got lost here as well: liyasthomas.github.io
Really cool work!

Could not help but notice a lot of UI similarities in your projects, do you use a certain UI library? or just re-use your own styles?

Liyas Thomas • Jul 12 '19

I currently don't use any 3rd party libraries. Just pure JavaScript, HTML & CSS. Of course I reuse most of my components, especially light/dark mode toggle, font stylings etc.

Ahmed Musallam • Jul 12 '19

I was looking at github.com/liyasthomas/books/blob/...

A lot of awesome things in there. and only 8KB unzipped or minified!

While inspecting the source I saw that

.category {
      height: 25vh;
}

Curious why you picked vh vs other units in this case?

I know users wont do this, but when shrinking the view-port height the title inside .category pops out :)

Liyas Thomas • Jul 12 '19

Nice you noticed that. What you explained is a bug/issue for sure.

But, sometimes some bugs are beautiful. At some use cases most of my apps would fail. But I don't mind that. Nothing is perfect. I'll certainly look into it and make it more better. Will add more bugs to fix later 🤪