Facebook Application Development [Paperback]

I'm relatively new to Facebook development, and not nearly as fluent with PHP as I'm sure many of the folks considering this book must be. So, you should probably read this review with that in mind.

I bought this and FBML Essentials at the same time, hoping that the two together would provide a sufficient understanding of the api and mark-up language. This book, as described by the other reviewers, has many typographical errors, which of course can be a nightmare if you're relatively low on the learning curve (as I am/was). If you choose to buy this book, you should most certainly download the source code from the wrox site to accompany your reading (as it seems it to be error free and because the code snippets in the book often leave critical methods and files out.)

The greatest shortcoming of this book is its lack of applied examples... many of the more advanced features in later chapters are listed in almost dictionary-style format, with no illustration or example code to explain how the methods and such are actually written and how they might be applied. Again, if you're well acquainted with php, you may be less in the dark than I and thus able to conceptualize how everything fits together. This is definitely NOT a book for novices (I found the O'Reilly book, although short, to be a more effective introduction to development via FBML in this respect (though it doesn't touch much upon the api and other more sophisticated techniques broached in this text.)

That said, the fact that there is such scant information available for Facebook development make this book worth your consideration; but I would definitely consider supplementing it with a book like O'Reilly's, and couple it with a pretty thorough acquaintance with the developer's wiki on Facebook. Even downloading and stepping line-by-line through the footprints application from Facebook will help you get the sense of how this stuff works.

Also be forewarned that this, and most of the books presently available, are not written for the new Facebook API written this summer (2008)... so methods like require_add() are no longer recognized and throw errors... this of course can be quite confusing if you're new to all of this.

Using this book, the wiki, and O'Reilly text, I was able to make my first Facebook App that lets users feature a particular video pertaining to a charitable cause from a small library in their profile boxes and application tabs. If you're trying to do something basic like that, you should be able to do so with these resources. Good luck!

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.

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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