SFPaperbacks.com is your resource for classic science fiction books from the golden age and beyond. It's also a Web site created by Bob to showcase his growing collection of vintage science fiction paperbacks, as well as demonstrate his web development skills including PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, AJAX, jQuery and CSS.
The site uses PHP and a MySQL database to deliver dynamically generated pages that allow for searches by author, cover artist, editor, publisher, year of publication, cover price, and various themes such as "robots" and "flying saucers." Books can also be viewed alphabetically and by decade. Dynamically generated book pages display details of each book as well as any cover taglines, back cover text and interior marketing text. Amazon.com links are also built dynamically to include search parameters for each specific book, so with just one click visitors can do an Amazon search and purchase a copy of the book for themselves. All page layout and styling is done using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
The home page includes a "quick book look" box that uses server-side sessions and AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) to create a book viewer that visitors can use to browse through all the books in the database without having to reload the entire home page. When the next or previous book buttons are pressed, the page requests the next book from the server and replaces the previous book info, leaving the rest of the page as it was.
"The Latest" is a what's new section that uses WordPress as a content management system to easily post new entries. New posts are added via the WordPress admin portal, and are integrated directly into the site using PHP and the WordPress API.
At the bottom of the home page is a bookshelf that allows visitors to browse backwards and forwards through every book in the database. Clicking the arrows at either end of the shelf slides in the next or previous set of books. With a few clicks, visitors can view every single book, in alphabetical order, from beginning to end and wrapping around again. This functionality uses a combination of JavaScript, PHP, AJAX and jQuery (for animating the bookshelf). Clicking on a book takes the visitor directly to the details page for that book.
See it for yourself by visiting http://www.sfpaperbacks.com/.