bookbot

A small command-line tool that reads a plain-text book and prints a report: total word count plus a per-character frequency table (letters only, sorted most-to-least frequent, case-insensitive).

Built as a Boot.dev learning project.

Requirements

• Python 3.13 or newer
• uv (recommended) — or plain python3

Run

uv run main.py books/frankenstein.txt

Without uv:

python3 main.py books/frankenstein.txt

Exactly one argument is required: the path to a UTF-8 text file. With no argument the script prints usage and exits with status 1.

Example output

============ BOOKBOT ============
Analyzing book found at books/frankenstein.txt...
----------- Word Count ----------
Found 75767 total words
--------- Character Count -------
e: 44538
t: 29493
...
============= END ===============

Sample books

books/ contains frankenstein.txt, mobydick.txt, prideandprejudice.txt. Any plain-text file works.

Project layout

File	Purpose
main.py	CLI entry point: reads the file, prints the report
stats.py	Counting helpers (get_word_count, get_char_counts, chars_dict_to_sorted_list)
books/	Sample input texts
pyproject.toml	Project metadata and dev dependency group

Development

uv sync            # install dev tools (mypy, ruff, pytest)
uv run ruff check .
uv run mypy .
uv run pytest      # no test files exist yet