FLASK BOOK RECOMMENDER APPLICATION

Find more info about this app and see it running here.

Here contains code for a book recommender application built in Flask. This will include the following features:

• selecting book titles for the recommender system
• select the number of recommendations to retrieve
• shuffle results
• results shown with image and link to google search for more info

Prerequisites

The following skills and methods were used:

• Familiarity with recommender systems
• Python, SQL and Flask
• HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Jinja
• Google BigQuery
• Heroku

Data

The raw data for this project has been included in the data folder, however, the source location can be found here.

Files and File Structure Details

• data/ : this contains the base data used to build the similarity matrix
• resources/ : this contains all the classes and functions used in the application
• static/ : this contains all the CSS and JavaScript code required to render the frontend.
• templates/ : this contains the frontend HTML

The following files were written for the purpose of deploying the API on Heroku's server.

• requirements.txt : this contains all the python libraries that need to be installed in order to run the app
• runtime.txt : this tells Heroku the version of Python you are using
• Procfile : this will give instructions to Heroku to run the app using gunicorn

Helpful Resources

• Recommender Systems blog post
• Pandas GBQ Documentation
• Jinja Documentation
• Getting started with Heroku
• Comprehensive Flask Tutorial