A Perl script catalogs books and CDs with the help of barcodes

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Article from Issue 97/2008
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Barcodes efficiently speed us through supermarket checkout lines, but the technology is also useful for totally different applications. An inexpensive barcode scanner can help you organize your private library, CD, or DVD collection.

Dealextreme.com, a company from Hong Kong, offers all kinds of inexpensive goodies. Customers can pay with PayPal, and shipping is free. Interested in a laser pointer for less than two dollars or a SATA/IDE adapter for just eight dollars? If you don't mind waiting up to two weeks for delivery, you're guaranteed to find a bargain with Dealextreme.

For quite a while I had my eye on the CCD-based barcode scanner for US$ 42 dollars (see Figure 1) (one of Dealextreme's most expensive products [2]) before I finally pressed the Buy button.

Mail from Hong Kong

When the mailman finally delivered the package, I could hardly wait to get started. The obvious choice was to write an application to scan the barcodes in my extensive collection of technical literature and store the results in a database. Depending on where the book comes from, the barcodes are either printed in UPC (Universal Product Number) or EAN (European Article Number) format, and Amazon.com offers a free web service that gives you detailed product information if you submit either barcode. This means that a Perl script can easily identify the author and title of a book or the artist for a CD that you scan. The data returned by the service includes CD and book cover images. Adding a graphical user interface to the application lets me display the book cover or CD case onscreen and in color after scanning.

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