Facebook Application Development by Nick Gerakines
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(Paperback)
- Pub. Date: May 2008
- 340pp
- Sales Rank: 418,955
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Product Details
- Pub. Date: May 2008
- Publisher: Wiley, John & Sons, Incorporated
- Format: Paperback, 340pp
- Sales Rank: 418,955
- Series: Programmer to Programmer Series
- ISBN-13: 9780470246665
- ISBN: 0470246669
Synopsis
- The wildly popular Facebook social networking platform has published an open Application Programming Interface (API) and developers are eating it up—60,000 signed up to use it in the first few days; with this API, any programmer can create applications and new features for Facebook
- Explores and explains the components available to programmers, including working with Facebook Markup Language (FBML), querying Facebook with FQL, application layout and flow, advanced configuration and performance tuning, and more
- Businesses such as NBC, Yahoo!, Red Bull, Forbes, and the Washington Post are building branded applications to reach the growing Facebook community
Biography
Nick Gerakines is a software engineer at Yahoo! in San Francisco, California where he works on del.icio.us and contributes to numerous other projects and Facebook applications. In addition, he has written several Facebook applications of his own, including the popular I Play WoW application. He is an active member of the Facebook developer community and writes frequently on the topic. He lives in Mountain View, California with his wife, Carolyn, and daughter, Vanessa.
Customer Reviews
Facebook Application Developmentby Anonymous
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June 20, 2008: 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.
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