Authors are sometimes able to give a truly appealing title to an otherwise dull treatise. On those unfortunate occasions, the book title entices potential readers who will later be disappointed by the contents. This was one such occasion for me. Rather than learning about the key design issues behind social programming platforms, I simply found some information about the application programming interfaces (APIs) needed to connect one’s own applications to three of the major social networking sites.
As a matter of fact, the author admits that the book was designed to be a complement to the documentation made available online by Facebook, Twitter, and Google. This might be a worthwhile goal in itself, especially for many open-source projects that lack the proper documentation. However, Facebook, Twitter, and Google provide complete and up-to-date online documentation for their APIs. Moreover, it is easy to find a wealth of tutorials and code snippets online, making books such as this dispensable unless they offer something beyond code snippets for interacting with the public interfaces of existing platforms.
As a work that is somewhere between a tutorial and a reference guide, it is difficult for this book to find its niche. Its chapters are not as goal oriented as hands-on tutorials, but they are not as thorough as reference guides either. They mix short pep talks from marketing materials, brief descriptions of the overall organization of large APIs, and extremely detailed code snippets. The somewhat unorganized content is not in the most suitable form for readers to support its progression. A more tutorial-like approach, with basic examples followed by more elaborate snippets, would be preferable.
This book consists of four parts. The first three are devoted to three of the leading providers of online social networks: Twitter, Facebook, and Google. The author dissects the APIs provided by the aforementioned vendors. Readers will find unending lists of API methods, their parameters, and short code snippets in PHP and JavaScript, but not much insight into the design that led to such solutions (for example, readers will find an interesting chapter on the design behind the Facebook platform in Spinellis and Gousios’s book [1]).
Readers will also learn how to perform the user authentication process in all of them--a must for being able to use them. The book describes each platform independently, however, and does not offer in-depth analysis comparing the features that each social networking platform provides. Readers should also note that this book was written before the announcement of Google+, and it is not clear how much this affects the part devoted to the Google OpenSocial and Friend Connect gadgets.
The fourth part of the book simply guides the reader through the implementation of a PHP application that makes use of the three platforms. Although this part would not qualify as an exercise in literate programming, the author guides readers through the process of building a Web application using a model-view-controller (MVC) framework (such as CodeIgniter) and incorporating the glue code necessary for interacting with the three platforms described in the previous parts of the book.
The author is sincere when he acknowledges that, as developers, “not only will [we] have to contend with existing features being changed, [we] will also have to react to new features being added or old features being deprecated and removed.” He does not take any preventive measures, however, to ensure that his book does not become quickly outdated. If trying to hit a moving target in print is essentially difficult, with this approach it becomes an impossibility.
Given that other readers’ needs might easily differ from mine, I recommend checking out the author’s Web site (http://www.socialprogramming.info) before jumping to a final conclusion; it includes a sparsely updated blog and the most recent versions of the complete source code for the examples in the book.
