John Licato said
As already stated, there are lots of little errors, more than a few of them that should have been caught. It's very clear that this book was written in a hurry, and it's very much a reference book and not a very good how-to guide. You're gonna need to know php, obviously you'll need to know HTML, and it's best that you are familiar with javascript and perhaps some AJAX will help as well. Even so, the book is disorganized in such a way that I've frequently come across things that I don't remember him describing, so I'd look it up in the index and not find it there. So I'd end up having to use google to find examples and explanations, making me wonder why I bought this book in the first place.
Jerry Saperstein said
The photo of author Nick Gerakines on the cover makes him appear very young. The words of the author, however, demonstrate his competence both as a programmer and a writer.
Gerakines' writes in a spare, almost terse style. There is no fat in his words. If you know nothing about programming, you will quickly become lost.
Chapter 1 is a thorough an overview of "Facebook as a Platform" as anything I've seen in my heretofore limited experience. Gerakines' direct style is effective in communicating information: "Facebook does not host the application, nor do the applications live on the Facebook network.' Important knowledge stated clearly and plainly. This chapter reviews what an application is, how (in broad terms) it interfaces with Facebook and the user, reviews some popular applications and discusses why you might want to create a Facebook application.
Chpter 2 is a tutorial on building your first simple Facebook application: a gentle way to familiarity.
Chapters 3 through 7 explore the different methodologies that can be used to develop Facebook applications. It is a very rich programming environment. While I have no plans to write a Facebook app (I am just learning the architecture), I was surprised by how extensive and flexible the Facebook Platform is. It is easy to see why so many people are excited by the possibilities.
These chapters are quite detailed and, if you have at least some experience with PHP, XHTML or XML, SQL relatively easy to follow. However, the examples are short. It would have been better if there were more robust examples.
The remaining chapters cover Facebook's developer resources, expanding the teaching application from Chapter 2, creating external applications, best practices and an appendix containing a PHP reference. The guts of the book are in Chapters 3 through 7.
Overall, this is a pretty well structured and written introduction to Facebook application development. It is somewhat more than a primer and far less than a thorough exposition of Facebook application development. Good for novice through very early intermediate Facebook application developers.
Jerry
Bruce Gendler said
Agree with other reviewers regarding 1) annoying number of errors and the frustration that caused, and 2) the lack of added value in the dictionary style reference sections. What was most frustrating was the presumptive approach to much of the text. Explanations for many things go half way - because they assume the reader has some knowledge or mental starting point which is known to the author but has to be figured out by the reader.
Christopher Spence said
I'm relatively new to Facebook development, and not nearly as fluent with PHP as I'm sure many of the folks considering this book must be. So, you should probably read this review with that in mind.
I bought this and FBML Essentials at the same time, hoping that the two together would provide a sufficient understanding of the api and mark-up language. This book, as described by the other reviewers, has many typographical errors, which of course can be a nightmare if you're relatively low on the learning curve (as I am/was). If you choose to buy this book, you should most certainly download the source code from the wrox site to accompany your reading (as it seems it to be error free and because the code snippets in the book often leave critical methods and files out.)
The greatest shortcoming of this book is its lack of applied examples... many of the more advanced features in later chapters are listed in almost dictionary-style format, with no illustration or example code to explain how the methods and such are actually written and how they might be applied. Again, if you're well acquainted with php, you may be less in the dark than I and thus able to conceptualize how everything fits together. This is definitely NOT a book for novices (I found the O'Reilly book, although short, to be a more effective introduction to development via FBML in this respect (though it doesn't touch much upon the api and other more sophisticated techniques broached in this text.)
That said, the fact that there is such scant information available for Facebook development make this book worth your consideration; but I would definitely consider supplementing it with a book like O'Reilly's, and couple it with a pretty thorough acquaintance with the developer's wiki on Facebook. Even downloading and stepping line-by-line through the footprints application from Facebook will help you get the sense of how this stuff works.
Also be forewarned that this, and most of the books presently available, are not written for the new Facebook API written this summer (2008)... so methods like require_add() are no longer recognized and throw errors... this of course can be quite confusing if you're new to all of this.
Using this book, the wiki, and O'Reilly text, I was able to make my first Facebook App that lets users feature a particular video pertaining to a charitable cause from a small library in their profile boxes and application tabs. If you're trying to do something basic like that, you should be able to do so with these resources. Good luck!
W Boudville said
This Facebook Application Development has the unfortunate acronym FAD. One might wonder if the recent to-do about writing these applets will ever amount to much, from an economic standpoint. The book scrupulously avoid discussion about this aspect. Instead it assumes that you have already made the decision to write an application, and need to know how.
So it explains the Facebook Markup Language; a sort of-HTML. It lets you write graphics onto a Facebook page. FBML is not hard at all. As a markup language, it is much simpler than a full graphics language like OpenGL. The top level structure of the application involves you having your own server, that sends API requests, FBML code and queries to Facebook, which then filters these and, if things seem kosher, makes a dynamically generated Facebook page to be seen by an end user.
Sadly, the book is marred by sloppy editing. Just a few examples. On page 17, it talks about 4 different Canvas page request types. But it only shows 3 of these. While page 19 has "This application allows users to display and rank a list of other users on their profiles". There are 2 sets of users in this sentence, and it is unclear which set "their" refers to. The problem here is that it is clear to the author, because he has internalised all this, but it is simply ambiguous to a reader. Then there is an outright typo like on page 20, "... and customize the content that is display within the profile".
Meanwhile, embedded in the entire narrative is this repetitive structure - "allows users to comment...", "It allows Facebook users to display...", "allows the user to select...", "It allows you to invite...". This "allows ... to" is far too verbose. Simpler is to use "let", like "lets users comment" or "It lets you invite". The written text wraps concepts and is meant to convey these as effectively as possible to the reader, right? If you have to use a repetitive structure, it is better to make that as short as possible, helping the concepts be easier to parse. Shorter rather than longer.
Comments