Ruby on Rails 3 and Google Book Search

I'm trying to get started using the Google Data API for Google Book Search in my Ruby on Rails 3 application, and I don't even understand how to get started. What gems do I need? What do I need to do in order to do something simple like searching for books wit开发者_高级运维h a title of Foobar?

Following up on the deprecation issue: I've just published GoogleBooks, a Ruby wrapper that enables users to query for books precisely in the manner described.

It's updated to hook into the present-day Google API, so it's not affected by the recent deprecation of the Google Book Search API.

If you're looking to use Google Books to retrieve information about books, you can use their data API: http://code.google.com/apis/books/docs/gdata/developers_guide_protocol.html

Making requests to a URL like http://books.google.com/books/feeds/volumes?q=isbn:9780974514055 will return XML with the book's information. You could use the Nokogiri gem to parse the result ( http://nokogiri.org/ ).

One thing to be aware of is that, to get the full descriptions for books, you need to get the entry instead of just the feed results.

Here's a short example of how you could get a book's information from Google:

require 'open-uri'
require 'nokogiri'

class Book
  attr_accessor :title, :description
  def self.from_google(title)
    book  = self.new
    entry = Nokogiri::XML(open "http://books.google.com/books/feeds/volumes?q=#{title}").css("entry id").first
    xml   = Nokogiri::XML(open entry.text) if entry
    return book unless xml

    book.title       = xml.css("entry dc|title").first.text       unless xml.css("entry dc|title").empty?
    book.description = xml.css("entry dc|description").first.text unless xml.css("entry dc|description").empty?
    book
  end
end

b = Book.from_google("Ruby")
p b

if you want to use the api, i think you will have to use jruby and their java api. no ruby api exists for the book search, according to this: http://code.google.com/apis/books/docs/gdata/code.html

for connecting with google, try using the gdata gem. http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/articles/gdata_on_rails.html#SetupRails