Ruby gem: xisbn
Tonight I was working on comparing all my be-ISBNed books at thingISBN and xISBN, but while testing and debugging I hit xISBN’s daily limit and had to stop. They very quickly fixed that but I’m going to delay a day in posting the results. The numbers were looking very interesting, both for how xISBN and thingISBN compared and for how many manifestations there are of books like Don Quixote and Treasure Island.
Instead, today I give a pointer to something that may help people who use the programming language Ruby.
A helpful commenter named James left a note last Friday with a pointer to the xisbn Ruby gem written by Ed Summers. Thank you, James! Thank you, Ed! If you’re a Ruby hacker doing anything with xISBN or thingISBN, it’ll be handy. You can say
require 'xisbn'
include XISBN
xs = xisbn('0394821998')
things = thing_isbn('0812548345')
You’ll get back arrays of ISBNs from both services. Run gem install xisbn to install it.
If you know of anything similar for other languages, please leave a comment or drop me a note.