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Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services, Raymond Yee, Appress 2008
This book covers a wide range of different "mashup" approaches, and covers a number of mapping web services and examples. Although it covers some non-programming approaches to creating mashups, you will need some programming ability in order to get the most out of the book. Advanced users of online map technologies will probably not find anything new from a programming point of view, but they may find the book a source of useful references to lesser known services. The book is recommended for readers with some programming experience but who are wanting to create modern web mashups of their own.
Web mashups mix different online data sources to produce new applications. For example, a mashup could search Flickr for photographs and then plot them on an interactive Google Maps map. With the creation and publication of thousands of online web service APIs during recent years, mashups have become very popular. Web maps in their various forms are currently the most popular component of mashups. This book describes the different approaches to creating mashups using a range of examples. It also lists many of the available services, provides ideas, and even gives some tips to creating your own 'mashable' APIs and websites. The book is divided into four parts. The first part, Remixing Information Without Programming, covers the basics of creating mashups. As well as serviing as an introduction, it shows you how to learn from specific mashups, and how to discover the "mashup potential" of a website (basically, look for an API and avoid screen scraping if at all possible). It also covers popular programming-free mashup data sources such as feeds, RSS, Atom, tagging, and folksonomies. The second part, Remixing a Single Web Application Using Its API, covers web APIs. Most of the examples use Flickr (a popular choice for examples in the book), but this part also covers JavaScript widgets and other APIs such as Google Maps. This section serves as an introduction to using web APIs. It does not cover mashups as such, but lays the groundwork for more advanced programming mashups. It also heavily references ProgrammableWeb.com as a source for finding useful APIs. This site is new for me, and is an example of how experienced web programmers can still find useful references in this book. The third part, Making Mashups, gets into the job of creating mashups from multiple APIs. This takes the above sections further and gives some examples as to how to mix different APIs, eg. displaying Flickr images on Google Maps. "Glue" mashup tools such as Yahoo! Pipes are also covered. The final chapter in this part describes the design principles of making your own website mashable, eg. the choice of REST vs. SOAP and XML-RPC. A lot of these principles are more philosophical in nature, e.g. "don't be too controlling" or "foster a community". The final part, Exploring Other Mashup Topics, is the longest and covers a range of different application areas and advanced topics. These topics include online maps, calendars and event aggregators, online storage systems (Amazon S3 only), working with desktop services (documents and spreadsheets), and microformats. The online map chapter is the most extensive map section in the book, and covers services such as Virtual Earth (now Bing Maps) and Google Earth. Third party services such as MapBuilder are also covered. Overall, this is a good book for the right community. Advanced web programmers will find the various site and service references useful. Although non-programmers should be able to get something from the book, they will find most of the book inaccessible. Really, the book is best for people with some programming experience who wish to start mixing their own mashup applications, and perhaps even create their own mashable websites and services.
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