PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects: Practical PHP Mashups with Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, MSN Search, Yahoo!: Create practical mashups in PHP ... MSN Search, Yahoo!, Last.fm, and 411Sync.com [Paperback]

Shu-Wai Chow (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 13, 2007

Create PHP projects that grab and mix data from the likes of Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, MSN Search, Yahoo!, Last.fm, the Internet UPC Database, not to mention the California Highway Patrol Traffic service! If you feel confident with your PHP programming, familiar with the basics of HTML and CSS, unafraid of XML, and interested in mashing things up, this is the book for you! There are a lot of formats and protocols, web services and web APIs encountered in this book - you do not need to know anything about them or about AJAX; you will find all you need in the book.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Shu-Wai Chow has worked in computer programming and information technology for the past eight years. He started his career in Sacramento, California, spending four years as the webmaster for Educaid, a First Union Company, and another four years at Vision Service Plan as an application developer. Through the years, he has become proficient in Java, JSP, PHP, ColdFusion, ASP, LDAP, XSLT, and XSL-FO. Shu has also been the volunteer webmaster and a feline adoption counselor for several animal welfare organizations in Sacramento. He is currently a software engineer at Antenna Software in Jersey City, New Jersey, and is finishing his studies in Economics at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Born in the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, Shu did most of his alleged growing up in Palo Alto, California. He lives on the Jersey Shore with seven very demanding cats, four birds that are too smart for their own good, a tail-less bearded dragon, a betta who needs her tank cleaned, a dermestid beetle colony, a cherished Fender Stratocaster, and a beloved, saint-like fianc¿.

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing; 1st Ed. edition (September 13, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 184719088X
• ISBN-13: 978-1847190888
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #806,012 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Everything you need to know about APIs and mashups, November 17, 2007

By 

Christian Montoya "Mappdev.com" (USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects: Practical PHP Mashups with Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, MSN Search, Yahoo!: Create practical mashups in PHP ... MSN Search, Yahoo!, Last.fm, and 411Sync.com (Paperback)

This is basically a "everything you need to know about APIs and mashups" kind of book. It is very example-focused, so besides giving the foundation for understanding alphabet soup like REST, SOAP, XML and JSON, you also get to follow some complete projects that use these acronyms for some healthy learning-by-doing. Here's a basic rundown of the things you will learn: XML, RSS, RDF, XSPF, XML-RPC, REST, SOAP, JSON, SPARQL, some basic Ajax, screen scraping with DOM functions, installing and using PEAR classes, and creating a simple proxy for cross-site XMLHttpRequests. The mashup examples use all of these, and they are very practical projects.

I learned about XML/RDF/REST in college with Java as the language of choice, and I've been able to use some APIs in the past with the help of PHP client classes. This book, however, covers a lot of different technologies in less than 300 pages, and it gives you what you need to know to not be dependent on client classes provided by the myriad of services out there, which is extremely helpful since you can't always expect a drop-in client class to be available.

And even if you think that as a web developer you have no plans of ever building a web application or mashup service, there's still the chance that your employer or some client will someday need one of these services on a project. In that sense, the things taught in this book are pretty much required knowledge for any web developer these days, because as much as web 2.0 might be a fad, all the alphabet soup technologies involved are not. We'll be using them for many, many years to come.

In short, I recommend this book. Even if you know this stuff pretty well, this book still offers a lot to learn.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good entry in a crowded marketplace, October 29, 2007

By 

James Stewart (Grand Rapids, MI, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects: Practical PHP Mashups with Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, MSN Search, Yahoo!: Create practical mashups in PHP ... MSN Search, Yahoo!, Last.fm, and 411Sync.com (Paperback)

he market for books about mashups has become fairly crowded over the past few years but none have really enticed me as from a casual look most seem more interested in following the trend than offering solid information. Thankfully PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects manages to slide in a good number of practical programming tips as it works its way through a variety of services.

The book dedicates the majority of each chapter to more general concerns than just interfacing with the system in the chapter's title. So Chapter 2--"Buy It On Amazon"--spends most of its time exploring XML-RPC and REST approaches and building tools to work with those different styles of interface. Similarly the next chapter spends most of its time introducing WSDL, XML Schema and SOAP before showing how they can be used with Microsoft Live Search.

In fact, that chapter may be one of the best introductions I've seen for developers who need to quickly grasp the basics of WSDL and SOAP, a topic that can far too easily get bogged down in complexity that isn't needed for basic usage. With the WS-* stack quickly and for good reason going out of fashion hopefully most developers won't have to spend much time with it, but a simple overview is still very handy.

I was intrigued to see the final chapter diving into use of RDF with the RAP toolkit. Like the SOAP section, this managed to boil the basics of RDF down very well and should help most moderately experienced PHP developers to get up to speed quickly.

Aside from a closing section on race conditions, not much time is given to handling interruptions in service from third-party services and in a book focussed on mashups that's disappointing, particularly as the number of services, and so the range of fallback options, is increasing. Some of the examples are likely to fail if services time out and it would be good to spend some time on helping developers avoid that.

Reading the book as someone who has mostly left the PHP fold for pastures new was a reminder of how easy tools like hpricot make life for screen scrapers, but also that good structure can emerge in PHP code and that the SOAP tools are actually quite good for simple uses. The book is unlikely to appeal to those who don't do much work with PHP, but if you're a PHP developer and want to dive into mashups and web services for the first time, it's worth a look.

Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book for review by the publisher, and offered another in return for a timely review.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a book for those who want more knowledge about the web, October 25, 2007

By 

Kevin Ison - See all my reviews
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This review is from: PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects: Practical PHP Mashups with Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, MSN Search, Yahoo!: Create practical mashups in PHP ... MSN Search, Yahoo!, Last.fm, and 411Sync.com (Paperback)

A very different book from the normal computer books I spin through. In fact its one of the better computer books. The target audience for this book is those with experience in software development, more to point, web development. It was a welcome relief. The author doesn't do what most software books do and include a beginners view of the web and web
development. He dives in and from the beginning I was trying things out. The author also gives excellent project description and breakdowns on what must be done to get it going.


One of my favorites from the book was the section on screen scraping. Something I havent had to do in a few years and it was awesome to get another perspective on how to do this. The book covers a few APIs and services, Google map, Amazon, Youtube to name a few. He brings up excellent detail on how to use and access these services. The author gives enough information without overloading the reader.

All in all a very good book. One I plan on recommending to my peers. It has made web development a bit more enjoyable and more knowledge in areas where I was weak. it never hurts to learn more!