Customer Reviews

Building Flickr Applications with PHP

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If you wish to add social software capabilities to your Web applications or simply want to have a way to aggregate a bunch of nice pictures from Flickr on your website, this book is for you. You don't need any prior knowledge of Flickr features or even PHP programming experience. But if you already do, you will quickly enjoy the numerous tutorials. All of them are written in a very clean and simple form.

A great asset of this book is that it truly caters to anyone. A chapter of the book is devoted to give you all the basic skills you need to have in PHP in order to use the Flickr API. The book uses a very powerful programming interface created by of the authors. Morton's API is, without a doubt, the most intuitive and comprehensive Flickr programming interface out there. It has a very clean PHP5 Object Oriented architecture. All the Flickr elements can be treated as a collection of PHP objects. The authors really know the API in great details, so you can't go wrong with this book.

A chapter will also tell you how to setup your development environment (including Apache, PHP5 and the required plugins). Wether you're a PC or Mac user, you will find help here. It will also walk you through the process of registering and generating API keys.

Not only does it cover the usage of the API, but it also explains how to use the Flickr feed services for generating RSS and Atom files. Advanced topics such as uploading photos through the public API are also covered along with source code examples.

I found some of the more advanced examples really helpful for my projects.

When I got this book, I was surprised at how small it was. That's not always a bad thing, however. It is hard-cover, which I just don't like. I like softcover books because they fit in back-packs better and usually keep the cost lower. Oh well, now to the content.

As an experienced PHP programmer and flickr user, over 1/3 of the material was easily skimmed through. There is an intro to flickr, and an intro to PHP. Then the authors take you into actually registering for a Flickr API account and you can start access photostreams.

All in all, it was a very fun to work thought the examples and start modifying them on my own. The work with RSS/ATOM was quite fun and not something I do on a daily basis, so having the text on hand was nice.

The only downside to the book was that there is very limited exposure to the real Flickr API. Most interaction with Flickr is handled through a PHP-pear library/application named Phlickr. It works quite nicely and is maintained by one of the authors, so it is understandable why this was chosen. I do think a little more interaction with the vanilla API probably would have helped though.

If you are into media-driven web design and social site integration, this a fun book to work through.