Thread: Not sure where to start: Trying to write a program dealing with an Amazon API

Hey guys,
Im fairly new to programming in Java and I was wondering if I could get some help with this program.

The final output and problem that I am suppose to be implementing is having the prices of the books off amazon put into a Microsoft Excel document based of the books ISBN or OCLC number. The OCLC numbers and ISBN numbers for now are also saved in a Excel Document which I would like to use for testing for the type of search that I need to implement. So the main point of this program is to Type in a OCLC or ISBN number and for the program to find and match this number to the name of the book and the price on Amazon. If my program did this it would be fan-freaking-tas-tic and it would be as if Justin Bebier actually left planet Earth for good.

The only problem is i really dont know where to start. If I could just get some suggestions or tips that would be amazazazazazing.


Michelle

There are different ways of solving this problem. It depends upon how you want your program or how does your professor wants it to be done. The starting point could be visualizing how your program might work. I would assume it would be something like, the program will ask the user to enter the isbn number and the program will show the the name of the book and its price on amazon.com to the user. This would be simplest way of doing it.
The first thing should obviously be recording all the data in excel, the name of the book, its isbn and the price in different columns.
Then next comes writing the main program. You should learn file input stream and file output stream in java for this.
The simplest algorithms could be.
1. The program ask user to enter isbn number.
2. The program then opens the excel file through fileinputstream
3. It checks the file with isbn number
4. If the number is found, then it sends the book name and its price back to the program
5. the program displays the info on the screen.

Hope this would help you