Facebook Application Development (Programmer to Programmer)

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.

While there are minor typos in the text, I found this book covered everything I needed to know to build my facebook application. The text and examples are very detailed and the author's style makes the book fun and easy to read. If you are getting started building facebook applications, than this book is for you.

I found this book to be a barely acceptable reference, but only because the Facebook documentation is so bad. The book is full of annoying little errors in the text and sample code. For example, a section on FBML tags for navigation starting on page 51 promises a more complete discussion of the topic in chapter 10, which turns out to be about external application development.