Customer Reviews

How to Do Everything: Facebook Applications

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This book was very helpful to me. My coding skills are very rusty (cira late 80's early 90's) and focused around Java and C++, so the targeted introductions to each of the web technologies (XML, XHTML, PHP, and MySQL,)focusing on just what was necessary for Facebook programming was very helpful. I was able to get through the examples in the book much more comfortably than the example on the Facebook developer site. That example assumes a lot of basic web development knowledge that you may or may not have, where this book steps you through the process.

The book is designed so that you can jump in where it makes sense for you. (I'm fairly experienced with Facebook so I skipped Part I and started in on Part II.) If you are very experienced at web development and are looking to transition your existing skills to the Facebook platform, then you may only gain from reading sections of Part II and Part III of the book.

On the whole I found the book very understandable and usable. The author does a good job at anticipating questions. It would be nice if there were some diagrams showing how a Facebook application is structured and the flow. Also, the download link for the sample code is difficult to find (finally found it on the author's site.)

All in all, I highly recommend this book.

I set out to learn how to use Facebook and as part of that, picked up some books on building Facebook applications. This title, "How to Do Everything: Facebook Applications" is a good primer.

It begins with an introduction to the components of Facebook, though like every other book, it is obsolete to a certain extent because Facebook recently changed its user interface.

Once done with that it moves into the programmability of Facebook.And Facebook is, to this beginner at least, astoundingly programmable. You can use PHP, XHTML, CSS, XML, Facebook's own Facebook Markup Language (FBML) and a couple of other techniques. Facebook is truly a very rich environment.

Some people have criticized the book for its lack of depth and heavy borrowing from Facebook's own developer pages. Both criticisms are justified. However, this book is intended to be a primer and the information within it is set out in a more usable form than on Facebook's site.

As a primer, an introduction to the possibilities and methodologies of creating Facebook applications, this book is good. It will not make you an expert by any stretch of the imagination, but it will whet your appetite for experimentation and more advanced books.

Jerry

Let's face it, the facebook doc on the web page leaves much unanswered. I was hoping this book would fill in theses answers but it did not. It provided very little more than the existing web pages to help one build a good facebook application.

Meh
A bit rubbish
Not actually readable. Heaven help you if you're just learning this stuff