(~ click for next page ~)

to very careful structuring of the HTML. After a lot of finagling, (and I mean -a lot!), I eventually managed to get everything to work properly and the result is this page.
Now I know it's not perfect by any means, but the basics are sound and all the literature opens and every book shares the one CSS Style Sheet. (Which also was a self-imposed goal).
I am satisfied.
Thank you for reading this.
May your God go with you.

To achieve this I had been using the web developer tools provided within various browsers and I discovered that, to my horror, the emulator provided for the IPad and IPhone are not accurate! Till then I hadn't bothered checking on my actual IPad ( I've been developing this on my Windows laptop), to see how the site was working but when I did I found that the z-index I had been using extensively did not work with IOS on my IPad or IPhone. It took a while to find that the problem was the z-index. What a bummer!
I reasoned however that since the device toolbar in the web developer toolset would be the instrument used to check the efficacy of my project, I could probably get away with it not working absolutely properly on the actual device. I'll give it it's due, - that reasoning held water for a couple of hours and then......I decided to start from scratch again and find a way to make the text pages turn 180° and still be legible without using the Z-index.
Luckily I found the the backface-visibility property that defines whether or not the back face of an element should be visible when facing the user. I was able to abandon Z-indexing and revert

(~ click for next page ~)

a door represented by the cover of a book. Using only HTML and CSS to achieve this proved a difficult challenge. Doing so however taught me much about animations and transitions among many other things in CSS. The first problem to become apparent was that if you open a door, in other words flip an element or, put another way, rotate it on its y axis by 180 degrees, the image is reversed,- which is of course what you should expect, but is not ideal if the element contains text. To combat this, I first decided that, not being able to do mirror writing in HTML, the solution was to create an image and process that separately, so that I could then embed the mirror text image in the HTML which then, when it was reversed by turning it 180-degrees, the text would be revealed properly legibile. This was a reasonable compromise at the time and it's what you see on the index page of this website (though it felt a bit like cheating). But the next problem I encountered ensured that I would have to start over again from scratch, (one of many such events). To complete this library page, the one you're looking at now, whilst adhering to the PSet specifications the webpage needs to appear properly in all devices and screen orientations.

Every failure (of which there were many, many) and every head banging frustration served to teach me more, which after all, was the name of the game for me. I had the time, and as I said, it was an indulgence. Every page of HTML provided it's own unique challenges.

~ The Site Concept ~

As I see it, life on Earth exists in a pretty hazardous environment and for human beings the challenge, without seeming too melodramatic, is be able to adapt and survive and have some pleasure doing it!. One of the the best weapons that we have in our armoury is curiosity. The more curious we are the more we learn. Curiosity is like a door that we open in our mind. Every question we ask opens another door and every answer we find behind that door provides us with another potential existential tool. A door to perception. With this in mind, I decided that the central visual image for this website should be that of a door that was capable of opening, - (as depicted in the the index page of this website) or, as on this page,

(~ click for next page ~)

you that I am almost 72 years of age.
I ran away from home when I was 15 and have no formal academic qualifications to speak of.)
The Sinclair ZX80 was also my first introduction to programming languages in the form of BASIC and although I have indulged in various programming projects in all the years since,- it has always been in a haphazard and informal way and peripheral to my main life requirements of simply finding a way to survive and provide for the needs of me and my family.
So anyway, I have reached that point in the CS50 course that requires me to complete this particular Project. It has been a journey let me say but still, a labour of love. I began this problem set with a concept and, armed only with Curiosity and dogged determination, I set out to make the concept work. Given that I was a virtual newbie and required to comply with the specs that were laid out for the project, - using HTML Bootstrap and CSS only - (self-imposed non JavaScript), it was certainly challenging! Had I been less ambitious I could certainly have completed the project far sooner and more easily, but I wanted to create something a little different, and for me, the fun was in the challenge of doing that!

General Comments

23rd Apr 2020
I guess my first comment should be that I am not at all certain anyone will be, or is meant to be, reading this. If I'm addressing a machine - well, hello machine! To anything more sentient, I'd just like to say' Hi there', and thank you for taking the time to visit. I hope you find something of interest. If a CS50 course staff member is reading, let me say a special thnk you for all your combined efforts providing me with this wonderful route map for my continuing journey of curiosity.
At this point a little background might be useful. I embarked on the CS50 course, not as a means to a career, but merely to indulge the pleasure I find in computer technology in general. This has been a continuing fascination for me since circa 1980 when a friend and I bought a Sinclair ZX 80 computer kit -(1KB of RAM - 4KB of ROM - awesome!). They had just come on the market as a part of the then nascent - 'available for all'- home computing technology. (I should probably tell you at this juncture that I was born on the 30th of September 1948 in the back streets of Belfast Northern Ireland, so a swift calculation will tell