Resource-based design thinking in Rest API - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Resource-based Design Thinking with REST API

📖 Scenario: You are building a simple REST API for a library system. The system manages books as resources. Each book has a unique ID, a title, and an author.We will create the data structure for books, configure a filter for books by author, implement the core logic to select books by that author, and finally output the filtered list.

🎯 Goal: Build a REST API endpoint that returns a list of books filtered by a given author using resource-based design thinking.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary called books with book IDs as keys and dictionaries with title and author as values

Create a variable called filter_author to hold the author name to filter by

Use a dictionary comprehension to create filtered_books containing only books by filter_author

Print the filtered_books dictionary as the output

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Filtering resources by attributes is a common task in REST APIs, such as listing books by author or products by category.

💼 Career

Understanding resource-based design thinking and filtering is essential for backend developers building APIs that serve dynamic data based on client requests.

1

DATA SETUP: Create the books dictionary

Create a dictionary called books with these exact entries: 1: {'title': 'The Hobbit', 'author': 'J.R.R. Tolkien'}, 2: {'title': '1984', 'author': 'George Orwell'}, 3: {'title': 'The Silmarillion', 'author': 'J.R.R. Tolkien'}

Rest API

# Create the books dictionary with the given entries
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Remember to use the exact keys and values as shown, with book IDs as keys and dictionaries as values.

2

CONFIGURATION: Set the filter author

Create a variable called filter_author and set it to the string 'J.R.R. Tolkien' to filter books by this author

Rest API

books = {
    1: {'title': 'The Hobbit', 'author': 'J.R.R. Tolkien'},
    2: {'title': '1984', 'author': 'George Orwell'},
    3: {'title': 'The Silmarillion', 'author': 'J.R.R. Tolkien'}
}
# Set the filter_author variable to 'J.R.R. Tolkien'
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Make sure the variable name is exactly filter_author and the value is the exact string.

3

CORE LOGIC: Filter books by author

Use a dictionary comprehension to create a new dictionary called filtered_books that contains only the books from books where the author matches filter_author

Rest API

books = {
    1: {'title': 'The Hobbit', 'author': 'J.R.R. Tolkien'},
    2: {'title': '1984', 'author': 'George Orwell'},
    3: {'title': 'The Silmarillion', 'author': 'J.R.R. Tolkien'}
}
filter_author = 'J.R.R. Tolkien'
# Create filtered_books dictionary with books by filter_author
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a dictionary comprehension with the condition to check the author matches filter_author.

4

OUTPUT: Print the filtered books

Write a print statement to display the filtered_books dictionary

Rest API

books = {
    1: {'title': 'The Hobbit', 'author': 'J.R.R. Tolkien'},
    2: {'title': '1984', 'author': 'George Orwell'},
    3: {'title': 'The Silmarillion', 'author': 'J.R.R. Tolkien'}
}
filter_author = 'J.R.R. Tolkien'
filtered_books = {book_id: info for book_id, info in books.items() if info['author'] == filter_author}
# Print the filtered_books dictionary
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(filtered_books) to show the filtered dictionary.