This was a fun project! By the time I finished, I felt like I had a good tangible product that I could proudly show off! It feels great to see the time I am putting into learning is paying off.
For this project, I decided to do a Content Management System for books. I ended up with 5 tables/models: user, book, author, genre, and author_genre. Throughout the Sinatra section I had kind of struggled a little with setting up the relationships between my models, but doing the Playlister and Fwitter projects right before this portfolio project cleared things up a lot for me and now it all makes sense.
Another fun thing that I enjoyed working on this project was experimenting with CSS a little. Even though it wasn’t required, it made the project feel a lot more usable and polished.
I think this project went pretty smoothly for me. I am sure there are better ways to handle validation and error messages than what I have implemented, and that will definitely be something I will work on to improve this application.