David Goodwin

Some time ago, Packt publishing sent me this book to review. Here it is, being somewhat overdue!

ISBN: 978-2-847190-88-8
Author: Shu-Wai Chow
Title: PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects
Publisher: PacktPub.com
Number of pages: 278

My initial interest in this book was due to a requirement to "do" SOAP/XMLRPC etc. The book concentrates on creating a number of "mashups" (joining together remote web based services in one interface) which includes using :

• Google Maps
• Flickr
• Amazon
• Youtube
• MSN Search
• Yahoo!
• Last.fm
• 411Sync.com

And to talk to these services, it uses the following protocols :

• SOAP
• REST
• XMLRPC
• AJAX

And data format's used when talking to the services are :

• RDF
• RSS
• XML
• XPSF
• SOAP
• JSON

The book is divided into 6 chapters, each of which covers creating a MashUp project, ranging from buying "stuff" on Amazon (Ch1) to mashing together Google Maps and Flickr to produce a London Tube Photos site (Ch6)

The PHP Code does possibly reinvent the wheel in a few cases (e.g. writing a REST parser class) whereas I'd probably use the Zend Framework's Zend_Rest client instead. But, given the publishing cycle, it's probable that the book was written before Zend_Rest was released. This same sort of complaint is true for e.g. the AJAX queries in Ch6.

I don't remember noticing any obvious typos in the code or the content of the book, aside from a few instances where " was replaced with a » sign.

While some of the mashups themselves didn't appeal to me, but the discussion of what was taking place and the explanation of how to use the protocols was very useful, and could easily be applied to different problems. So, even if you aren't interested in the mashups made, consider buying the book for it's discussion of the underlying technologies.

The book slowly builds up, and by the final chapeter we finally get to see AJAX in use - along with RDF and SPARQL. This chapter is somewhat more dependent on Javascript. Thankfully, the explanations of all of this is done very well, and the author stepped through the problem, explained the solution and new technologies and revealed the solution as you progress.

To summarise - it's a good book. I had no complaints (but then I didn't pay for it either). If you are looking for a book to help you write mashups, this is a good start (and probably all you'll need). It's easy enough to read, and has a good balance between code and text.

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