LBSC 690: Assignment #4 (Fall 2008)

Design a Database: You are fed up with ridiculous book prices! With your new-found knowledge of relational databases, you've decided to create a website for University of Maryland students to buy and sell used textbooks. The site will have four major functionalities:

• Students selling books must be able to post a "book for sale" ad.
• Students looking for books must be able to post a "book wanted" ad.
• Students selling books must be able to search "book wanted" ads.
• Students looking for books must be able to search "book for sale" ads.

Develop this website. The deliverables for this assignment consist of three items:

• An interface mock-up. There must be at least two different ways to search "book wanted" ads, and two different ways to search for "book for sale" ads. I expect this site to be well-designed and I expect you to make appropriate use of CSS.
• A specification for the database. Describe what tables and what fields you would have. Identify the primary keys and foreign keys. (You can use HTML tables for displaying your ideas; show a few sample records). Think about how you would lay out the relevant relations, taking into consideration issues such as normalization.
• A description of how each of the searches will be executed, in terms of join, project, and restrict (or directly in SQL statements if you are comfortable with that).

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This page, first created: 21 Oct 2008; last updated: