Developing Feeds with Rss and Atom Review

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(More customer reviews)This book has some good resource citings, and general information on RSS. It includes a lot of discussion on the previous iterations in the RSS geneology...up to the current RSS 2.0 specification.
The index is not very thorough.
I bought the book hoping to learn more about RSS feed development (as the title suggests). I was greatly disappointed. There is one chapter dedicated to RSS 2.0. Within the chapter there is a section entitled "Creating RSS 2.0 Feeds." This section--you would think is the core of the book-- is 8 pages long (if that) including 3 pages of Perl code examples.
Good luck if you want to learn about creating Atom feeds from this publication. There is a 14 page chapter dedicated to Atom. It is prefaced with a disclaimer indicating that code in the chapter may fail due to version rot (and to surf the web for answers). Also in this chapter, there is a section entitled "Producing Atom Feeds." This consists of 2 brief paragraphs explaining how the current Atom version is not worth addressing and suggests purchasing the next edition of the book to find out how to produce feeds using up to date libraries!!!
You can draw your own conclusions from all that.
This book falls far short of the quality O'Reilly books of yore.

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Perhaps the most explosive technological trend over the past two years has been blogging.As a matter of fact, it's been reported that the number of blogs during that time has grown from 100,000 to 4.8 million-with no end to this growth in sight.

What's the technology that makes blogging tick?The answer is RSS--a format that allows bloggers to offer XML-based feeds of their content.It's also the same technology that's incorporated into the websites of media outlets so they can offer material (headlines, links, articles, etc.) syndicated by other sites.

As the main technology behind this rapidly growing field of content syndication, RSS is constantly evolving to keep pace with worldwide demand.That's where Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom steps in.It provides bloggers, web developers, and programmers with a thorough explanation of syndication in general and the most popular technologies used to develop feeds.

This book not only highlights all the new features of RSS 2.0-the most recent RSS specification-but also offers complete coverage of its close second in the XML-feed arena, Atom. The book has been exhaustively revised to explain:

metadata interpretation
the different forms of content syndication
the increasing use of web services
how to use popular RSS news aggregators on the market
After an introduction that examines Internet content syndication in general (its purpose, limitations, and traditions), this step-by-step guide tackles various RSS and Atom vocabularies, as well as techniques for applying syndication to problems beyond news feeds.Most importantly, it gives you a firm handle on how to create your own feeds, and consume or combine other feeds.
If you're interested in producing your own content feed, Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom is the one book you'll want in hand.

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Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services (Expert's Voice in Web Development) Review

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(More customer reviews)Kudos to the author and publisher for this release.
This book is a tour de force of the subject of Mashups.
I was looking for a good book on this subject so that I could introduce it to students as part of an extra-curricular technology program in NYC and this book is perfect.
In a sentence, Mashups are created by taking data from one or more sources and making something new and useful from them.
In my opinion, the subject is very important because there is a vast amount of data that is available now. Today the challenge is not just finding data but putting to use. This book shows you how to do that.
The author's writing style is excellent, mixing theory and applications. The book is filled with hands on examples as well as references for research in each of the areas.
I believe that this book can be read by anyone interested in the subject, regardless of their technical background. For those that want to create Mashups without programming, this book shows you how. For those that want to delve into programming, everything that you need is covered including AJAX, PHP, various data formats and how to parse them, various Javascript libraries and more.
The book is laid out in four parts:
1. Remixing Information Without Programming
As the title suggests, the chapters in this section require no previous programming experience. The author walks through some specific examples, introduces terminology and analyzes how sites like Flickr and del.icio.us work so that you can get the most out of them. Tools such as Yahoo! Pipes (a browser-based visual application for Mashups and Remixing) are explored. Following along with the discussion the reader can put together a Mashup or Remix by simply understanding the concepts and using tools, but not having to delve into coding.
2. Remixing a Single Web Application Using Its API
For the person who wants to code, this part of the book jumps right in discussing the Flickr API, PHP usage, XML processing and more. From there the discussion moves to other APIs and using AJAX/Javascript widgets.
3. Making Mashups
This section starts by delving into the ProgrammableWeb website. Showing how to find what resources are available, studying existing Mashups via which APIs they use and how to go about creating new ones. From there XMLHttpRequest and Javascript libraries such as YUI are covered and a step-by-step example is given using the previously discussed techniques. Lastly, the author addresses issues around implementing Mashups on your site including standards, accessibility and your own API. I was glad to see these topics covered as sometimes in the haste of getting something online, they can be overlooked.
4. Exploring Other Mashup Topics
This final section of the book covers a large range of interesting topics such as Map-based Mashups, Social Bookmarking, Calendars, Online Storage, Desktop and Office Suites, Embeddable Data Formats and Searches.
As you can see, there's a lot of information covered in this book. In my opinion, everything that one could want on the subject and written in such a way that you want to keep reading, exploring and creating your own Mashups.
I highly recommend this book - so far, it has been my favorite read of 2008!

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Mashups are hugely popular right now, a very important topic within the general area of Web 2.0, involving technologies such as CSS, JavaScript, Ajax, APIs, libraries, and server-side languages (such as PHP and ASP.NET.) This book aims to be the definitive tome on Mashup development, to stand in the middle of all the other, more API specific books coming out on Google Maps, Flickr, etc.The book shows you how to create real world Mashups using all the most poplar APIs, such as Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon Web Services, and delicious, and includes examples in multiple different server-side languages, such as PHP, Java, and .NET. It will have a large target audience, but still deliver an effective and engaging learning experience, regardless of the specific technologies the reader prefers to use.

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Blogging and RSS: A Librarian's Guide, Second Edition Review

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(More customer reviews)I am not a blogger or a librarian, but by the end of the year I should be both. So this seemed like a good book to check out so I can hit the blogosphere and job market running. Now, before I start kvetching, let me state that this book does a perfectly good job at what it does, and my primary complaint is that I wish it did more, and did it in greater depth.
Basically, this is "Blogging and RSS for Dummies", with a very small dollop of librarian content. Yes, it kicks off with about 70 pages on "The Library Blogosphere," however the bulk of this material is devoted to the ten or so "stars" of library blogging (shiftedlibrarian, librarystuff, librarian.net, etc.). You get small write ups about each of these blogs, excerpts to indicate their tone, screenshots, and then their authors' answers to a brief questionnaire. This may be useful if you've got a lot to say about the profession and aim to crack their ranks, or if you're new to blogs and want to know what the good librarian ones are (although a two minute online search would lead you to the same blogs), but there's very very little information about how libraries use blogs. I guess the book I really want to read would be something like "Blogging and RSS for Libraries" (not "Librarians").
When it comes to actual blog creation, Sauers limits his tutorial (and that's what it is) to the free "Blogger" service (now a Google property), with only a one paragraph mention of server-based packages such as WordPress, MoveableType, and TypePad. Blogger is great at what it does -- you can have a nice-looking, free, basic blog up and running in minutes (well, as long as you have a Gmail account). However, most libraries are likely going to need the flexibility and custom features of the more robust server-based packages noted above. Blogger is so easy and well-documented that most people can probably skip the 40 pages of hand-holding covering blog set-up and preferences. Still, if that's what you need, this book does an outstanding job of walking you through the process, with plenty of screenshots to illustrate the way. However, it would have been far more useful to devote that space to server-based packages, which do require more hand-holding.
RSS is a bit more complicated and thus somewhat more worthy of Sauer's baby-step explanations. Again, the focus is on the simplest method, so while various flavors of aggregators are mentioned (stand-alone client, embedded client, and server-based), Sauers advocates and concentrates on the popular web-based Bloglines service (which now belongs to Ask.com). Again, Bloglines is so well documented, I'm not sure what the point of a lengthy print-based guide to account setup and maintenance is, but if you need it, it's here. And although RSS is of clear benefit to an individual librarian who's trying to keep informed, it's never explained how or why libraries might want to implement it to serve information to their users. RSS has some real practical applications, especially in special libraries, but these are never mentioned. There's a chapter outlining feeds that may be of interest to librarians, but again, these are easily found online, and I'm not sure what the point of putting them in print (where the information will be outdated almost instantly) is, when they could just all be listed on a companion web page. I'm also not sure what the value is of seeing a screenshot for every single blog and feed mentioned (another quibble is that these are often reproduced too lightly for easy legibility).
In the end, this isn't a bad starting point if you know nothing about blogs or RSS, but for anyone with even a minimum exposure to these tools and a specific interest in how their use might improve library service, it's unlikely to be very useful.

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In this fully updated second edition of his popular 2006 book, Michael P. Sauers shows how blogging and RSS technology can be easily and successfully used by libraries and librarians. In addition to providing easy-to-follow instructions for creating, publishing, and syndicating a blog using free web-based services, software, RSS feeds, and aggregators, Sauers covers newtools and services, introduces numerous useful library blogs and bloggers, and includes a new chapter on microblogging with Twitter.

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