Might have been called The Definitive Guide to RSS
One of the very best O'Reilly books I've read in a long time, is Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom by Ben Hammersley. On 240 odd pages, the author introduces the reader to syndication, feeds, the RSS dialects, the Atom syndication format and discusses parsing of feeds and creating feeds. This he does concisely and to the point but with a sense of humor which I greatly enjoy.
The only thing which might be expanded on in a second edition, would be how different RSS reader applications react to feed content. Never the less, I highly recommend this book to anybody wanting to get inside RSS feeds.
Get your creative juices flowing
Great intro to the history of RDF/RSS/Atom. Chapter 10 "Unconventional Feeds" will give you great ideas to create and manipulate feeds for yourself. Note that some content has been republished from "Content Syndication with RSS" (0596003838).
Sorely Lacking Content
This book has some good resource citings, and general information on RSS. It includes a lot of discussion on the previous iterations in the RSS geneology...up to the current RSS 2.0 specification.
The index is not very thorough.
I bought the book hoping to learn more about RSS feed development (as the title suggests). I was greatly disappointed. There is one chapter dedicated to RSS 2.0. Within the chapter there is a section entitled "Creating RSS 2.0 Feeds." This section--you would think is the core of the book-- is 8 pages long (if that) including 3 pages of Perl code examples.
Good luck if you want to learn about creating Atom feeds from this publication. There is a 14 page chapter dedicated to Atom. It is prefaced with a disclaimer indicating that code in the chapter may fail due to version rot (and to surf the web for answers). Also in this chapter, there is a section entitled "Producing Atom Feeds." This consists of 2 brief paragraphs explaining how the current Atom version is not worth addressing and suggests purchasing the next edition of the book to find out how to produce feeds using up to date libraries!!!
You can draw your own conclusions from all that.
This book falls far short of the quality O'Reilly books of yore.
Good, but heavy on the PERL
This book has some great info on RSS and Atom, although not as up to date as one might hope. This book, like the O'Reilly RSS book before it, has a good 1/2 of the book dedicated to PERL specific programming ideas.
Since I don't program in PERL, and can't necessarily follow along, I would much rather have seen more conceptual discussion about RSS/Atom possibiliities than the specific (PERL only) few examples.
Comments for instance - RSS has a tag, but the book doesn't go into depth at all on how to use it. As a webmaster of several blogs, I'd like to know more about the "right" way to do comments - is it as a separate feed? Can I put them inline? How do other people do it? What's the benefits one way or the other?
Overall, a good book, don't get me wrong. I'd just hoped for something a bit different, and hopefully that'll come soon.
Far more practical than Practical RDF
O'Reilly's other book on RSS related technologies, Practical RDF, was not very practical at all. This book, on the other hand, addresses a variety of real feed production and consumption topics in a set of language. You will learn the feed standards. But you will learn them through application, not abstraction. And I find that much more effective than a book that presents technologies at the standards level (most of which you never use anyway). Then leaves you hanging.
