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How to Do Everything with Web 2.0 Mashups Review

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(More customer reviews)This book reminded me of Marine Corps boot camp. We did a lot of stuff, but only just enough to say we did it and not enough to learn anything from it. This book tries to cover far too many topics in a very short space. We used this book for a class I took the summer before last. It is not even really a good introduction as it leaves out many particulars needed to understand what is going on. I had to do quite a bit of internet research just to figure out much of what this book purported to teach. I say skip this book and get some more thorough books on the individual topics.

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Want to supercharge your website with the latest searching, mapping, shopping, and imaging tools? Now you can build amazing mashups with help from this step-by-step guide. How to Do Everything with Web 2.0 Mashups shows you how to remix the best of Google, Amazon, Flickr, and eBay to create customized applications. You'll learn to use essential Web 2.0 technologies--including XML, JavaScript, XHTML, and REST--and seamlessly integrate them into your own innovative mashups.

Build dynamic mashups using XML and JavaScript

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Library Mashups: Exploring New Ways to Deliver Library Data Review

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(More customer reviews)Libraries are compendiums of data, but what point is there to the data if it's not presented in a good way? "Library Mashups: Exploring New Ways to Deliver Library Data" is a guide for librarians on how to use the internet and all of the applications that have spawned out of it to improve their library as it serves for a vault of information. Featuring contributions from countless professional librarians, "Library Mashups" is a collection that should not be ignored.

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Google Maps Mashups with Google Mapplets Review

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(More customer reviews)This is a pretty good intro book for Google maps. I was hoping for a little more depth, though. If you know nothing about Google Maps Mashups this is a good place to start but know that you may need a more advanced reference once you've been introduced. Well written and illustrated. Code examples are good. I went through the examples in the book and they all worked.

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This firstPress title is the first book Geo-Mashups developers will need to create Web 2.0 applications based on Google's new Mapplets technology. It presents both a complete guide to the new standard and the practical how-to that developers seek. Written by an award-winning, new technology expert from the New York Times, the book is both authoritative and eminently usable.

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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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del.icio.us Mashups Review

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(More customer reviews)For those of you who like to mash things, especially del.icio.us things - you must read this book! Not only is Brett O'Connor a del.icio.us expert, he can also string together a bunch of words like "API" "PHP/MySQL" and "aggregate" without sounding too geeky or scaring off those of us who are not smart so good on teh internets. w00t!

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del.icio.us offers millions of Web users an online social network in which to collect, organize, and share their favorite web resources. Using an underlayer of tools offered by del.icio.us, you now have the potential to tap into this social network in order to expand your own website to a whole new array of possibilities. This book will help you make the most of these possibilities and encourages you to use your own innovative ideas to create something useful, unique, and even fun.

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Ruby on Rails Web Mashup Projects: A step-by-step tutorial to building web mashups Review

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(More customer reviews)Providing a whistlestop tour through building a range of Ruby on Rails applications on the back of other services, Ruby on Rails Web Mashup Projects is aimed at those who are already comfortable building rails applications and want some sense of how they can be enhanced using a variety of other visualisation, data and processing providers.
Aside: The term `mashup' is one of those tech terms that's almost impossible to pin down. I should note that the way it used in this book (seemingly any application that draws on a third-party services) is not a way I'd choose to use it, but I'd rather focus on the book itself than on titling semantics.
The book hits all the usual suspects--google maps, flickr, technorati, wikipedia--and also covers the basics of building a facebook application, using paypal for payment processing, and sending faxes and SMS messages through a third party gateway. For those who want a quick overview of all of those options it'll give you enough to get started, though as a result of the pace only the very basics of each service is covered and anyone wanting to build a sophisticated app will have quite a bit of work in front of them learning the nuances of their chosen service providers.
Along with providing little detail of each service, the book suffers from not really digging into a number of topics that would make it a much more useful companion. Big challenges when building applications dependent on other peoples' servers include effective testing, caching, surviving third-party service outages, and good ways of integrating your interface code into your application.
Lip service is paid to the need to be prepared for a third-party service outage, but no examples of how to survive are offered. It wouldn't have been hard to illustrate ways of falling back to local databases or to secondary services, but none is offered. There's no mention of writing tests, so no opportunity to offer ways to use mocks to test the local code or to discuss how you might automate your testing of the integration itself, and caching is similarly overlooked except in the case of amazon e-commerce services where it is used to preserve historical data that amazon doesn't make accessible.
The absence of testing really shows through in some of the code offered. Much of the code demonstrated in the book is overly complex and procedural, with little in the way of modular, reusable components. Similarly there's little by way of discussion of where such code fits into your rails application, with some classes that are clearly models (albeit non-ActiveRecord models) dropped into the lib folder, and numerous very fat controllers.
Rather than covering seven separate projects, this box would have been much stronger had it focussed on two or three, but worked through them in significantly more detail. Possibly there wouldn't have been a chance to touch on as many services, but by building up one of the more diverse systems like the ticketing application in detail, covering failover, testing, clean integration with a rails app, and other such topics this could have been a much richer book with appeal for a far wider range of developers. As is, it's worth skimming through if you're looking for advice on sending faxes or SMS, but won't help much with the real challenges of building a robust application that's dependent on third-party services.
Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book for review by the publisher.

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Use Ruby and Ruby on Rails to create seven practical mashup projects following step-by-step instructions. This book is for Ruby on Rails developers who want to expand the features of their site by consuming remote external data and services. Basic knowledge of Ruby on Rails programming is required but you need not have any experience of any of the APIs used.

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Virtual Freedom: Net Neutrality and Free Speech in the Internet Age (Stanford Law Books) Review

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(More customer reviews)Corporations control one's window to the rest of the world. "Virtual Freedom: Net Neutrality and Free Speech in the Internet Age" discusses net neutrality and the threats to it, and why readers should care. Criticizing the recent changes that have threatened the upholding of net neutrality and how a possible repeal of it could do untold damage to America's economic and social ideals, "Virtual Freedom" is an intriguing and highly recommended read that is well worth considering for anyone concerned with the freedom of the internet.

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Communications giants like Google, Comcast, and AT&T enjoy increasingly unchecked control over speech. As providers of broadband access and Internet search engines, they can control online expression. Their online content restrictions-from obstructing e-mail to censoring cablecasts-are considered legal because of recent changes in free speech law.In this book, Dawn Nunziato criticizes recent changes in free speech law in which only the government need refrain from censoring speech, while companies are permitted to self-regulate. By enabling Internet providers to exercise control over content, the Supreme Court and the FCC have failed to protect the public's right to access a broad diversity of content. Nunziato argues that regulation is necessary to ensure the free flow of information and to render the First Amendment meaningful in the twenty-first century. This book offers an urgent call to action, recommending immediate steps to preserve our free speech rights online.

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