Ajax in Action

Foundations of Ajax (Foundation)

Xml

Developing Feeds with Rss and Atom

Format: Paperback
Author: Ben Hammersley
ReleaseDate: 14 April, 2005
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Rating:

Might have been called The Definitive Guide to RSS
On 240 odd pages, the author introduces the reader to syndication, feeds, the RSS dialects, the Atom syndication format and discusses parsing of feeds and creating feeds. One of the very best O'Reilly books I've read in a long time, is Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom by Ben Hammersley. This he does concisely and to the point but with a sense of humor which I greatly enjoy.

The only thing which might be expanded on in a second edition, would be how different RSS reader applications react to feed content. Never the less, I highly recommend this book to anybody wanting to get inside RSS feeds.

Get your creative juices flowing
Chapter 10 "Unconventional Feeds" will give you great ideas to create and manipulate feeds for yourself. Great intro to the history of RDF/RSS/Atom. Note that some content has been republished from "Content Syndication with RSS" (0596003838).

Sorely Lacking Content
It includes a lot of discussion on the previous iterations in the RSS geneology. This book has some good resource citings, and general information on RSS.. . up to the current RSS 2. 0 specification.

The index is not very thorough.

I bought the book hoping to learn more about RSS feed development (as the title suggests). I was greatly disappointed. There is one chapter dedicated to RSS 2. 0. Within the chapter there is a section entitled "Creating RSS 2. 0 Feeds. " This section--you would think is the core of the book-- is 8 pages long (if that) including 3 pages of Perl code examples.

Good luck if you want to learn about creating Atom feeds from this publication. There is a 14 page chapter dedicated to Atom. It is prefaced with a disclaimer indicating that code in the chapter may fail due to version rot (and to surf the web for answers). Also in this chapter, there is a section entitled "Producing Atom Feeds. " This consists of 2 brief paragraphs explaining how the current Atom version is not worth addressing and suggests purchasing the next edition of the book to find out how to produce feeds using up to date libraries!!!
You can draw your own conclusions from all that.

This book falls far short of the quality O'Reilly books of yore.