There must be an easier way to do this!

I just call Logos to see if there was an easy for them to let me know what resources I already own in the Complete Classic Commentaries Bundle. The advise I was given was to create a bibliography of my entire library and compare it to the Bundle to see what I am missing. Unfortunately my bibliography is over 500 pages. The Commentary Bundle has 1537 volumes - I don't have the time to sort through all these pages and resources.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks.

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Clifford Kvidahl

Ronald,

This may not be what you were asking, but maybe if you check your order history you could get a better picture at what you own, assuming you purchased them while they were still in collections. I hope this helps.

Cliff

Evan Boardman

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/513962#Comment_513962

Buy the Bundle and whatever downloads you didnt have before.[6]

William Gabriel

I'm trying to find a way to help out (would you be able to run a perl script on your computer*?), but I'm having some issues at the moment. I'm only able to locate 1115 of the 1537 in my catalog database at the moment. Once I can find the rest (anyone know of an easy way?), I can write a little program to help people identify which they're still missing.

George Somsel

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/514025#Comment_514025

Buy the Bundle and whatever downloads you didnt have before.

Assuming dynamic pricing is in effect, this should work.

William Gabriel

Well, I was able to locate 1,471 Classic Commentary titles. I believe that [most of] the difference is due to the way some volumes get bundled. For instance, Calvin's Commentaries count as 46 volumes on the Product page, but it's actually 19 volumes in my library (e.g. Psalms is 5 volumes in 1). I don't know if this effect makes up for the 66 volume difference, but I basically found all the Classic Commentary titles by tagging them in my library after going through the collections on the Product page.

If you have a Mac, the attached Perl script should simply run without a problem. If you have Windows, you will need to install Perl. You can do that relatively easily from ActiveState: http://www.activestate.com/activeperl.

If your Logos user data is simply in the default install location, this script will print out the volumes you're missing from the Bundle when run. If it's not there, then you'll see some type of error. Run the perl script with the option "perl check_cccb.pl -db=/full/path/to/the/logos/catalog.db". I reasonably try to find it in the script, but I'm sure it won't work for everyone.

Hopefully this works out for anyone who wants to see what they're missing. The file is "open source" so you can double check the code to make sure I'm not doing anything destructive to your computer.

Bill

7558.check_cccb.pl.zip

William Gabriel

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/514252#Comment_514252

Buy the Bundle and whatever downloads you didnt have before.

Assuming dynamic pricing is in effect, this should work.

That is exactly how I figured it out.

Ronald Quick

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/514293#Comment_514293

Thanks for the replies.

Before I could try the ideas suggested here I received an email from Logos listing all the resources that would be "new to me".

Thanks Logos for following up and giving me a list to look at. It was very helpful!

Todd Beall

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/514291#Comment_514291

Hi Bill,

I figured out how to run the script, and generated a text file. Is there any way to sort the file according to author, or am I out of luck there? (not sure if somehow I can convert it to excel spreadsheet form).

Thanks so much!

Todd

William Gabriel

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/521173#Comment_521173

Hi Bill,

I figured out how to run the script, and generated a text file. Is there any way to sort the file according to author, or am I out of luck there? (not sure if somehow I can convert it to excel spreadsheet form).

Thanks so much!

Todd

You probably could convert the output to excel format (split columns on the square bracket characters). But here's an updated version that fixes a possible database file path issue for some people (newer users of Logos), it's slightly smaller (I had a redundant column in my data), and it allows you to sort on author. Run the new program this way: perl check_cccb.pl -sort=author

0601.check_cccb.pl.zip

Todd Beall

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/521251#Comment_521251

Thanks so much! As a former computer programmer (back in the 1960's and 70's!) I am curious how you did this. I never heard of perl before your mention of it--what exactly is it? I would love to be able to manipulate the data in this way.

Still undecided about the classic commentaries, as the upgrade is still quite expensive for me!

Thanks again!

Todd

William Gabriel

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/521373#Comment_521373

Thanks so much! As a former computer programmer (back in the 1960's and 70's!) I am curious how you did this. I never heard of perl before your mention of it--what exactly is it? I would love to be able to manipulate the data in this way.

Still undecided about the classic commentaries, as the upgrade is still quite expensive for me!

Thanks again!

Todd

Perl is a bad habit of a programming language. [:D] It's really easy to whip something up, but because it's so loosey-goosey with the syntax, it can make it terribly difficult to grow or maintain a program. I like it for file & database access and string manipulation.

There's a lot of magic in perl (until you know the rules). For instance, there's a variable called $_ that's the implicit variable that many functions will operate on if you don't specify a variable. Take a look at this code:

open CSV, "</path/to/the.csv";

while(<CSV>){

chomp;

@cols = split /,/;

print $cols[$#cols] . "\n";

}

That program will open up the csv file you specify and print out the last column of data in each row;

I used perl because it has a built in database driver for sqlite, which is what all the Logos databases use. If you open up the example program I have in the thread, you'll see these lines. It's a piece of cake to use the DB data, then.

my $dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:SQLite:dbname=$opt_db",'','') or die "Could not connect to Logos database at $opt_db";
my $query = "select title from records where isavailable>0";
my $sth = $dbh->prepare($query);
$sth->execute();
while (my ($title) = $sth->fetchrow_array()){
#do something with $title from database
}
$sth->finish;
$dbh->disconnect;

William Gabriel

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/521373#Comment_521373

I was thinking that I should probably point to some resources if you're actually interested in doing some perl programming. One of the things that makes it so powerful is the package system. If you want to program perl do to something, it's likely that someone else has already wanted to do that and uploaded a package to cpan. Then you can download it and do something complex with just a few lines of code (DBI is a built in module, but it's really easy to install new ones with cpan on mac/linux or ppm using Activestate on Windows).

One thing that's nice is that it's all open, and there's a lot of documentation and examples.

Take a look at these sites if you really want to get started, find a perl programmer and start asking questions, or take a search online--almost everything is out there. You really can do anything you want in perl without too much effort. The biggest cost is that it's not very efficient, but it may be the most flexible language out there (some python or ruby programmers might disagree--and that's fine--any of those are great--perl just happens to be the first I learned, and I usually have to struggle with it the least to get it working properly on a new system).

http://www.perl.org/

http://www.perl.org/books/beginning-perl/

http://www.cpan.org/

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596000271.do

Regular expressions are worth learning. They are so popular because of Perl that other languages have started hacking them in (Perl's is most native and fluid to use). It's almost like learning another language, though. It can be tough until you've gotten your hands dirty.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression

http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/perl/regexp.html

-Bill