Building a Digital Library Catalog

Imagine you're building a system to manage a personal digital library. To do this effectively, you need a way to represent each book with its essential details. This challenge will guide you in creating a Python class to model these books, allowing you to store and access their information systematically.

Problem Description

Your task is to create a Python class named Book that will serve as a blueprint for representing individual books in your digital library. Each Book object should have specific properties to store information about a book.

Key Requirements:

• Initialization: The Book class must have an __init__ method that accepts the following arguments and assigns them to corresponding instance properties:
  • title: A string representing the title of the book.
  • author: A string representing the author of the book.
  • isbn: A string representing the International Standard Book Number.
  • publication_year: An integer representing the year the book was published.
  • genre: A string representing the genre of the book.
• Properties: Each of these pieces of information should be accessible as properties of a Book object.
• String Representation: Implement a __str__ method that returns a user-friendly string representation of the Book object, clearly displaying its title and author.
• No Validation (for this challenge): For this challenge, you do not need to implement any input validation for the properties (e.g., checking if publication_year is a valid year or if isbn has a correct format).

Expected Behavior:

When you create an instance of the Book class, the provided details should be stored. You should be able to access these details using dot notation (e.g., my_book.title). When you print a Book object, it should display its title and author in a readable format.

Examples

Example 1:

# Create a book instance
book1 = Book("The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", "Douglas Adams", "978-0345391803", 1979, "Science Fiction")

# Access properties
print(book1.title)
print(book1.author)
print(book1.isbn)
print(book1.publication_year)
print(book1.genre)

# Print the book object
print(book1)

Output:

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams
978-0345391803
1979
Science Fiction
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Explanation:

The book1 object is created with all its details. Each property is accessed and printed individually. The print(book1) statement invokes the __str__ method, producing a formatted string.

Example 2:

# Create another book instance
book2 = Book("Pride and Prejudice", "Jane Austen", "978-0141439518", 1813, "Romance")

# Access properties and print
print(book2.title)
print(book2.publication_year)
print(book2)

Output:

Pride and Prejudice
1813
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Explanation:

This example further demonstrates creating a Book object and accessing its properties, including printing the object itself using its __str__ representation.

Constraints

• The title, author, isbn, and genre properties will always be strings.
• The publication_year property will always be an integer.
• The number of books created and processed will not exceed typical memory limits for standard Python execution.

Notes

• The __init__ method is Python's constructor. It's automatically called when you create a new instance of a class.
• Remember to use self to refer to the instance of the class within its methods.
• The __str__ method is special; when you print() an object, Python looks for this method to get a string representation.