Jennifer said
I read this book from cover to cover I learn a lot about Facebook. I became sorta addicted to Facebook. After four weeks I had to find a way to block facebook. Right now I downloaded this program [...] to help me with my addiction ;-(
K. Debaere said
This is certainly the best book on this topic that I have read so far.
I am not technical at all but got it. Jay is able to explain in plain english what certain functionality is about.
The book gives a good summary of the viral viral integration points and how to leverage them. It is a theme through the book... and let's face it... that quite often makes the difference between successful or unsuccessful apps.
In addition it gave a comprehensive summary of what's out there on Facebook in terms of user interface elements that have been prebuilt already.
Oh yes, and the odd bit of humor is always welcome!
Jerry Saperstein said
This is the "must-have" book for Facebook application development. Other books I've seen on the subject are essentially primitive step-by-step tutorials that rarely, if ever, go beyond the simplest levels.
"Facebook Cookbook", on the other hand, gets into the real nitty-gritty. It goes into areas that other books don't, such as the use of Amazon Web Services for hosting your Facebook related storage needs, Facebook policies such as how many invitations you can send out a day and the criteria for their acceptibility to the Facebook "police" and so on.
The Problem/Solution approach taken is especially appropriate for a subject like Facebook application development. The Problem is posed, the Solution is suggested and then a Discussion may ensue that provides additional details. It is a very effective approach here.
The author has deliberately limited the range of tools he discusses in order to simplify matters, which is a wise move.
The range of subjects is broad. You can read this book straight through or dip into it as time and needs dictate.
I don't think this should be your only book on Facebook application development, though. One of the other "step-by-step" books should be considered, but you might want to wait a couple of months until new editions have been released to cover the new Facebook user interface.
Jerry
Eric M. Mcdonald said
If you have a fundamental understanding of PHP and MySQL, then the "Facebook Cookbook" will teach you everything you need to know about developing Facebook apps. I have read three books about Facebook developer, and this one is defiantly the best book by far. In three words,
Buy this book!
Christian D. Nunciato said
Facebook Cookbook is an excellent reference, covering and consolidating the explosion of publicly available (and often wrong) Wiki documentation. On the whole, it's well worth the Amazon price. However it's worth noting that the book all but presumes you'll be using the Facebook PHP library (which I'm not), and its "recipes" often lean so heavily on that presumption as to become useless to those of us using other APIs (or in my case, none at all). Definitely recommended as a bird's-eye survey of the Facebook Platform and API, but if you're not using PHP, you might find yourself a bit frustrated by how much of it the book contains.
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