PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects [ペーパーバック]

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.

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.

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!