My Library Desktop

I developed my reading habit a bit late — it started around the beginning of high school. During that time, I used to keep a list of the books I read. Later, just seeing the photos of the books I had finished gave me a sense of happiness. That’s how I continued reading, and I maintained this habit throughout my university life. When I was moving into my second year of university, we started learning C# in a Visual Programming course. I decided to prepare ahead of time and began learning C# on my own. At the time, Udemy was just starting to enter the Turkish market and wasn’t very popular yet — this was around the year 2017. I discovered a YouTube channel by Murat YÜCEDAĞ, and began watching his C# lessons and trying out the examples myself. After making some progress, I wanted to build a simple application, and the idea for “My Bookshelf Desktop” came to mind. Since the application was written in C#, it only worked on Windows systems. This was also the first time I learned how to use a Microsoft Access database and integrate it into a project.

The application was a simple desktop tool where I could save the books I read — including the start and finish dates, publisher, author, number of pages, book cover image, and even notes on highlighted sections. Thanks to the app, I now had a way to visually browse through all the books I had read. It allowed me to see how many books I read monthly, which authors or publishers I preferred, and quickly review the passages I had highlighted. Unfortunately, the source code of the project is no longer available, but hopefully this story will inspire others who may want to build something similar. :)