14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Facebook Developer Secondary Source, March 25, 2009
"Building Facebook Applications for Dummies" is a great book to get started on if you want to create your own Facebook applications in PHP. Topics include: FBML,Faceboook API, FQL, Connecting to a MySQL database, and tips/tricks/examples.
Some of the material though is outdated given that facebook social networking standards are always changing. This book is about 1yr old. Buy a cheap used copy as a secondary reference (I bought one used for $2.63 + shipping on amazon.com).
If you want the best, latest, and greatest Facebook developer book then I would highly recommend:
"Facebook Cookbook: Building Applications to Grow Your Facebook Empire" by Jay Goldman as a primary source.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best of the lot, so far, for beginning Facebook application developers, April 10, 2009
I've been trying to learn about Facebook both from a user's perspective and that of a developer. Why? Because any service with 200 million users is something I will run into in my work - and it looks like fun.
I've read several books on Facebook application development and this is the best I've seen so far. (I still have several to go, so my opinion may change.)
Author Richard Wagner takes a matter of fact approach and begins with the essentials, something other books oddly fail to do. One immediate standout feature is Wagner's diagramming and explaining Facebook's application architecture. Several other books omit this entirely or give it short shrift. Wagner diagrams it plainly and clearly and it helps.
Wagner deliberately restricts the scope of his book, again in contrast to other authors who try to include something on every language usable with Facebook. I prefer Wagner's "small steps" first approach. It is much easier to deal with and offers more depth, I think.
He starts off with building a very simple Facebook application and then moves into specific discussions of the Facebook API, FBTML, FQL and FJS. Don't recognize these terms? Don't worry: Wagner explains them thoroughly in easily understandable language with plenty of examples and illustrations.
There's as lot more and all of it is good.
But there is a drawback: Facebook is in a constant state of development and things change, sometimes massively. That happened recently and has many people upset for a variety of reasons.
In any event, some of the thins in this book are obsolete. That doesn't detract from its overall usefulness, though.
This is an excellent book for anyone who wants to understand the Facebook application development process.
Jerry
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Best book for Building Facebook Apps I have found so far, July 27, 2008
The is the best book for Building Facebook Apps I have found so far, yet it won't help you if you plan to integrate Flash as the app to display profiles, friends, etc. In fact, I have yet to find a book that helps you with that. Fortunately the FB Dev forums are very helpful and there are several good online sources that cover pretty much everything you can think of doing in FB, including Flash integration. This book is a good reference and doe sit a decent job showing how to build your first basic app.
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