The Developer's Guide to Social Programming:Building Social Context Using Facebook, Google Friend...

[Book Review Team]

Author/s : Mark D. Hawker
Publisher : Addison-Wesley Professional
Category : Other
Review by : Jeanne Boyarsky
Rating : 7 horseshoes

The book assumes you know PHP, JavaScript, CSS and assorted feed technologies. You don't have to be an expert, but you should be comfortable reading code in these languages.

My favorite things in the book were the flowcharts for the authentication/authorization model and the intro to some concepts. In particular, Twitter's OAuth really stood out as an excellent chapter.

The twitter chapters felt more rushed than the rest of the book. In some ways, I felt like the API was being thrown at me. The diagram form was mostly good, but the descriptions were very rapid fire. I say “mostly” because two of the UML like diagrams were in a font that was too small to read. [Edit: clearer images were posted on the socialprogramming.info]

The author does recognize technology changes quickly and says to follow his blog/site for updates.


Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for writing this review on behalf of JavaRanch.