I figured I should be able to let the computer choose a book for me. To do that, the computer needs to have a lot of stats on the books I own. Time to mine the Amazon web pages for those books to get the data I need.
So I am working on a scraper to grab the data I need from Amazon web pages. Then I plan to store this data in a MySQL database. With all the facts on hand, I am sure I can write a function that ranks the books in order from best to worst.
Writing the scraping portion turned out to be a big pattern matching exercise. Check. Next I need to store the scraped data in the database. I thought I had coded some Java that accessed a MySQL database. Turns out it was Java that accessed a Java DB.
No problem. How hard could it be. Well I kept getting exceptions stating that there was no suitable driver found to access MySQL using JDBC. Err it turns out I need the MySQL Connection J jar file in the classpath. Who knew?
