RSS and Atom in Action 26
Simon P. Chappell writes "We've all seen them, those icons that decorate blogs and websites; sometimes they're just little orange squares with white stripes, while others say RSS or Atom. Many of us have heard of feeds and podcasts and aggregators. What are these things and where did they come from? Well, Dave Johnson, the author of the open source Roller blogging software, is glad you asked and by way of an answer, he's written RSS and Atom in Action." Read the rest of Simon's review.
| RSS and Atom in Action | |
| author | Dave Johnson |
| pages | 368 (8 page index) |
| publisher | Manning |
| rating | 8 out of 10 |
| reviewer | Simon P. Chappell |
| ISBN | 1932394494 |
| summary | For blog applications, this book brings the right information at the right time. |
This is a book for programmers that want to use blog technology rather than programmers that want to blog. A subtle difference perhaps, but it'll make the world of difference whether this book is useful for you. So if you want to be the next Paul Graham or Steve Yegge, pass over this book and concentrate on your copy of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. For those of use who have a need for automated information distribution, where a blog or an aggregator or a podcast might make sense as the delivery channel, this book is the right information at the right time.
The book is organized in two parts. The first part is called "Programming the writable web". In it Mr. Johnson covers the "what" of blogging technologies. The first chapter covers the taxonomy of blogging terms and components. The second introduces us to the situations and characters that we'll be following through the rest of the book. Next we learn how to download, setup and run the example software available for the book. Chapter three takes us on a guided tour of the anatomy (Mr. Johnson's words) of blog and wiki servers and how to choose between them for your information distribution needs.
With all that level setting information out of the way, chapter four begins the process of rolling our sleeves up and getting geeky as we look at the RSS and Atom newsfeed formats. Now, we know what they are and what they look like, chapter five takes us through fetching and parsing those newsfeeds. Chapters six and seven show the use of the Windows RSS platform and the ROME newsfeeds utilities respectively. Chapter eight starts our journey to producing rather than just consuming newsfeeds. Chapters nine and ten then address publishing using XML-RPC based APIs and Atom.
Part two of the book addresses "Blog Apps", where a blog application seems to be fairly loosely defined as any application that interacts programmatically with a blog. The eleven chapters are fairly short, with part two totaling only about one third of the whole book. This works well, each chapter is very direct and doesn't waste any time getting into its subject matter. The subjects walk you through creating a group blog via aggregation, searching the blogsphere through services like Technorati, keeping your blog in sync, blogging by email, generating email digests, using a blog to report on software build processes, blogging chatroom conversations, distributing files as podcasts, how to automatically download podcasts, validating newsfeeds and then a whole wrap up chapter on interesting ideas that could be implemented using blog technologies.
When looking at things to like about this book, it doesn't hurt to have a forward written by Simon Phipps, the Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems and an endorsement from Tim Bray, co-creator of XML and Co-Chair of the IETF Atom Working Group. That got my attention.
The typography and layout of the book are up to the usual excellent standard of the "... in Action" series. Manning are to be commended for their dedication to enforcing the series style in their books, because a well-laid out and typeset book is a pleasure for the reader.
The examples in the book are written in a mix of Java and C#. This is interesting, because previously the majority of books have been dedicated to single platforms. Perhaps, this is a sign that the I.S. world is becoming more comfortable with the increasingly heterogeneous computing environments that we find ourselves surrounded by. Of course, it doesn't hurt that Java and C# share more similarities than differences, if I can say that without triggering visits from the attack lawyers at Sun or Microsoft.
Some of the lead-ins to the technologies use stories of folks at an imaginary company facing problems and overcoming them using blogging technology. You may find this a little too twee for your liking. I don't mind it, suspecting that it helps to give good context to the discussion, but you may not care for it.
Naturally, there is also the danger that the information may be outdated in a few years, but if you're in this industry that's just part of the package. I actually suspect that this book will be useful for quite a while, because while the activity of blogging is changing the world, the technologies behind it seem to be relatively stable at this time.
I like this book and I think that it brings the right information at the right time. If you want to work with blog technology, this book will give you a great deal of help. Now, get out there and publish!"
You can purchase RSS and Atom in Action from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
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And Bookpool.com [bookpool.com] (my preferred retailer of technical books) has it cheaper still. And look, it's yet another "it's cheaper on Amazon.com" post.
Seriously, anyone who reads Slashdot knows that they link to B&N, period. As I recall, I think that Rob actually posted about that specific topic a couple a years ago. I don't remember why they do, unless it has to do with earning commission off of it for the referral (which they do, but Amazon.com offers a similar Associates program [amazon.com]
, and I don't know which
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(most amazon aff. id's end in -20)
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I like this book (Score:1)
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RSS and Atom Security (Score:3, Informative)
Paper: Feed Injection In Web 2.0: Hacking RSS and Atom Feed Implementations, Robert Auger 2006 [cgisecurity.com]
Blackhat Powerpoint Slides: Zero Day Subscriptions: Using RSS and Atom Feeds As Attack Delivery Systems (Power Point) [cgisecurity.com]
Additional Feed Security Documentation: http://www.cgisecurity.com/rss/ [cgisecurity.com]
Interesting uses for RSS/Atom (Score:4, Informative)
Besides the whole blogging thing, we've used RSS feeds for product data transfer, and on our question/answer site http://www.funadvice.com [funadvice.com], members can use RSS to see when they get replies to their questions.
We've used RSS as a means to distribute various kinds of reports, server log summaries, and a host of other things. Its great using something like NetNewsWire and in the morning seeing the latest backup record out of the servers, just a well as new posts on the site. We've written Ruby scripts to generate RSS files showing traffic over the course of the day and other goodies.
I think RSS & Atom has been pigeon-holed to a certain extent.
Where's GeoRSS?! (Score:1)
First, the after years of work, the GeoRSS version 1.0 was released recently [georss.org]. Then you can read this excellent article on GeoRSS [geoplace.com]. Everybody is jumping on the GeoRSS bandwagon, even Microsoft [slashgeo.org] and the huge blogging world [slashgeo.org].
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Nothing to See here (Score:2, Interesting)
Paranoia (Score:2)
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