📚 Books4U

Overview

In my second year of university, during the 2019-2020 academic year, I was tasked with creating an e-commerce website as part of a project. While my classmates opted to use CMS platforms like WordPress or Wix, I decided to build the entire project from scratch using HTML, JavaScript, CSS, jQuery, PHP, and MySQL. The goal was to create a functional e-commerce site with the essential features for browsing, adding products to the cart, and processing payments.

Project Structure

The website consisted of five main pages:

• Home: The landing page for the website.
• Products: A page displaying all the available products.
• Categories: A page where products could be filtered by category.
• About: A page detailing the company and the website's mission.
• Contact Us: A page with a form to contact the site administrators.

Core Features

1. Database-driven Content

All of the product and category data were fetched dynamically from a MySQL database. Each page was server-side rendered using PHP to display the relevant content. For example, the URL products.php?cat=education would fetch and display the products in the "education" category. The database ensured that the product listings could be updated easily, and the categories could be expanded without touching the core code.

2. Security Measures

To ensure the website was secure, I took steps to prevent SQL injection by sanitizing and validating user inputs before executing queries. I also used prepared statements in my SQL queries, which are an industry best practice for preventing malicious code from being injected into the database.

3. Client-Side Cart

One of the features I spent the most time on was the client-side cart. It was a challenging yet rewarding process. I coded this feature from scratch using JavaScript and jQuery to ensure users could easily add products to their cart, view their selections, and adjust quantities. This feature took up most of my time because I wanted it to be smooth, intuitive, and efficient. It was a great learning experience, as I had to handle many aspects like updating cart totals dynamically, handling user input, and managing browser cookies for cart persistence.

4. Payment Integration with PayPal

To enable payments, I integrated PayPal into the website. I used PayPal's sandbox environment for testing and simulated a payment process to demonstrate the website's functionality. This allowed users to "checkout" and proceed to the payment screen, where the transaction could be completed securely.

Challenges Faced

The biggest challenge of the project was the time constraint. The website didn't have a user profile feature as initially planned because there wasn't enough time to implement it. However, the teacher's primary requirement was to demonstrate the e-commerce flow, which I achieved with the existing functionality: browsing products, adding them to the cart, and completing a transaction.

Another challenge was building the client-side cart from scratch. This required me to consider many user interaction scenarios, such as updating the cart when products were added or removed, and dynamically calculating the total. Without ready-made solutions, I had to design and implement everything on my own.

Lessons Learned

Looking back, I am proud of what I achieved with Books4U. I learned a lot, especially while coding the cart functionality from scratch. During this time, there were no AI tools like we have today. I had to rely entirely on my problem-solving skills and research to build everything myself. It was a rewarding experience, and I'm proud to have created something entirely from scratch without the temptation of ready-to-use code.

Though AI tools are invaluable today, I still cherish the foundation I built back then. The skills I developed while coding the project have given me the ability to approach problems with a strong, independent mindset—something that continues to serve me well in my current work.

Conclusion

Books4U was a significant milestone in my journey as a developer. It not only taught me about web development but also helped me refine my problem-solving skills. Even with the time limitations, I was able to deliver a fully functional e-commerce website that met the project requirements. I'm proud of the work I did and the lessons I learned, which continue to shape my development approach today.