How to Do Everything: Facebook Applications (How to Do Everything)
- Media: Book (Paperback, 330 pages)
- ISBN: 0071549676
- Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media
- Release Date: Feb 11, 2008
Product Description
Create your own Facebook applications!
With coverage of Facebook API, FBML, and FQL as well as MySQL and REST, How to Do Everything: Facebook Applications is a clear, start-to-finish guide to developing unique apps that run on Facebook Platform. Learn how to integrate Facebook applications with websites, blogs, and databases, and use your apps to sell a product and market a business, organization, or cause. You'll also discover how to provide entertainment and information to users while creating an advertising platform to make money. Get started quickly by downloading a pre-built, customizable Facebook application from the book's Facebook Page.
- Understand the Facebook Platform architecture
- Format Web pages and manage data using XML, XHTML, and CSS
- Use PHP and FBML (Facebook Markup Language)
- Work with the Facebook object, Facebook REST object, and Facebook API
- Use FQL (Facebook Query Language), Mock-AJAX, FBJS (Facebook JavaScript), and Facebook Mobile
- Master the Facebook Developer Application
- Design your application interface and implement utilities
- Integrate MySQL or Data Store data
- Add viral features including News Feed and Mini-Feed stories, notifications and requests, Share buttons, and favorites lists
- Promote your business with Facebook Social Ads, Facebook Pages, and Facebook Beacon
Great Guide for the novice to intermediate
This book was very helpful to me. My coding skills are very rusty (cira late 80's early 90's) and focused around Java and C++, so the targeted introductions to each of the web technologies (XML, XHTML, PHP, and MySQL,)focusing on just what was necessary for Facebook programming was very helpful. I was able to get through the examples in the book much more comfortably than the example on the Facebook developer site. That example assumes a lot of basic web development knowledge that you may or may not have, where this book steps you through the process.
The book is designed so that you can jump in where it makes sense for you. (I'm fairly experienced with Facebook so I skipped Part I and started in on Part II.) If you are very experienced at web development and are looking to transition your existing skills to the Facebook platform, then you may only gain from reading sections of Part II and Part III of the book.
On the whole I found the book very understandable and usable. The author does a good job at anticipating questions. It would be nice if there were some diagrams showing how a Facebook application is structured and the flow. Also, the download link for the sample code is difficult to find (finally found it on the author's site.)
All in all, I highly recommend this book.
The book is designed so that you can jump in where it makes sense for you. (I'm fairly experienced with Facebook so I skipped Part I and started in on Part II.) If you are very experienced at web development and are looking to transition your existing skills to the Facebook platform, then you may only gain from reading sections of Part II and Part III of the book.
On the whole I found the book very understandable and usable. The author does a good job at anticipating questions. It would be nice if there were some diagrams showing how a Facebook application is structured and the flow. Also, the download link for the sample code is difficult to find (finally found it on the author's site.)
All in all, I highly recommend this book.
Submitted 27 May 2008
Very little that is not on the web pages
Let's face it, the facebook doc on the web page leaves much unanswered. I was hoping this book would fill in theses answers but it did not. It provided very little more than the existing web pages to help one build a good facebook application.
Submitted 17 Apr 2008
