Customer Reviews

Beginning RSS and Atom Programming

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The rise of blogging has caused RSS technology to become extremely important in today's computing environment. To more fully understand this subject, I took a look at Beginning RSS and Atom Programming by Danny Ayers and Andrew Wyatt (Wrox/Wiley).

Chapter List:
Part 1 - Understanding the Issues and Taking Control: Managing the Flow of Information - A Crucial Skill; Where Did Information Feeds Start?; The Content Provider Viewpoint; The Content Recipient Viewpoint; Storing, Retrieving, and Exporting Information
Part 2 - The Technologies: Essentials of XML; Atom 0.3; RSS 0.91 and RSS 0.92; RSS 1.0; RSS 1.0 Modules; RDF - The Resource Description Framework; RSS 2.0 - Really Simple Syndication; Looking Forward to Atom 1.0; What Is Atom?
Part 3 - The Tools: Feed Production Using Blogging Tools; Aggregators and Similar Tools; Long-Term Storage of Information; Online Tools; Language-Specific Developer Tools;
Part 4 - The Tasks: Systematic Overview; Modeling Feed Data; Storing Feed Data; Consuming Feeds; Parsing Feeds; Producing Feeds; Queries and Transformations; The Blogging Client; Building Your Own Planet; Building a Desktop Aggregator; Social Syndication; Additional Content; Loose Ends, Loosely Coupled; What Lies Ahead In Information Management
Appendix A - Answers To Exercises; Appendix B - Useful Online Resources; Appendix C - Glossary; Index

This book was actually a whole lot more than I expected... As a blogger, I want to be sure the RSS feed I produce is valid and readable by newsreader clients. I just expect my newsreader to take care of things for me. But instead of just covering *how* to produce an RSS feed, the authors cover the entire spectrum of RSS technology. You get the history of RSS/RDF/Atom as well as some discussion of why they came into being. So for someone who isn't familiar with RSS at all, they'll quickly pick up all the necessary background to understand why this whole thing is critical. Then after covering the formatting of the different RSS standards, they move into consumption issues. While you may not be interested in building your own aggregator, understanding how your feeds will be used leads to a much better solution up front. Add in plenty of code examples, file snippets, and exercises to extend your knowledge, and you have a pretty complete coverage of the topic.

If you're only interested in details on building a feed, this book might not be quite as focused as you'd like. But if you're just getting into RSS from a programming perspective, this would be a good choice to give you an overall understanding.

Far too heavy on "tools" rather than "concepts". In a year, the tools all change, but the concepts remain the same. For the same price, choose Ben Hammersley's O'Reilly book. It will be 250 focused pages that will give your the perfect lay of the syndication landscape. This Wrox book rambles on for 720 pages!

This book focuses a LOT on the tools that manipulate RSS. Theory Theory Theory. Not direct to the point. Just pages and pages of flab. I would suggest to look elsewhere.