Facebook Application Development with Graph API Cookbook [Paperback]

This book is totally useless, uses the old facebook api and the code is totally deprecated even the registering an application part is wrong. I though that beeing published on november 2011 the book would had been updated but it wasn't so it's like throwing your money to the garbage... as someone said, the good review shuld be before the change or the author himself.

Today (December 29, 2011), I have finished reading the book `Facebook Application Development with Graph API Cookbook'. This is a great resource for developers who are interested in building Facebook applications.

There's no special knowledge required to read this book. Every (web) developer with a basic understanding of computer programming should be able to benefit from it. However, if you want to run the examples (recipes), you should already know your way around web development in the areas of at least HTML, JavaScript and (preferably) PHP.

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This is what the book covers:

Chapter 1. Creating a New Facebook Application - You will learn how to prepare your environment, and all the necessary steps to set up your first Facebook application. If you've never registered a Facebook application before, this step-by-step recipe will help you (and save you a lot of time!).

Chapter 2. Be a part of Social Graph - This chapter is great in teaching you the basics of the Open Graph concept. You will find examples of the most commonly encountered tasks. If you're looking for an easy way to interact with the Open Graph, just use the Graph API Explorer (available at [...])

Chapter 3. Querying Facebook - You will learn how to use FQL, Facebook's own query language. Read carefully, and you will notice some powerful queries that are not possible via Open Graph calls.

Chapter 4. Using FB Script - Download the JavaScript SDK and start implementing cool client-side scripts. You can use the JavaScript API for both: Graph API calls and FQL.

Chapter 5. Expressing Yourself - This chapter will show you how to use dialogs for requesting permissions, adding friends and more.

Chapter 6. Bringing Facebook to your Website - You will learn about the most frequently used Social Plugins (e.g. Like Box, Send Button). It covers most commonly used XFMBL tags.

Chapter 7. Connecting Websites to the Social Graph - If you want your website to benefit from Facebook, you have to make sure that your website becomes part of the Open Graph. You will learn how to do it, by using special meta tags.

Chapter 8. Fiddling with Virtual Currency - This chapter is about Facebook credits and how to integrate it in your application. You can use the Facebook Credits API to handle transactions. After reading this chapter, you will be amazed about how mature the Facebook platform is.

Chapter 9. Creating Advertisements and Analyzing Metric Data - Facebook Insights provides useful information regarding the way users interact with your application. This chapter might help you to think of new opportunity on how to benefit from a commercial Facebook application

Chapter 10. Creating Instant Applications - You will learn how to build a couple of applications from scratch. PHP programmers will probably benefit the most from this chapter.

Chapter 11. Using Facebook Open Graph Beta - This chapter is about Facebook's newly lounged Timeline and Open Graph Beta. Learn how to add your own Objects, Actions and Aggregations to the Open Graph.

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This book does exactly what it says: Quick answers to common problems. You can simply pick any topic from index, and jump right into the recipe!

There are basically two ways how to exchange data with Facebook, either by using FQL (Facebook Query Language) or by hacking into the Open Graph (Graph API calls). Both methods are well covered in the book.

Whenever you exchange data with Facebook, you need to be aware of the required user permissions that apply. This book does a great job in providing a clear overview of permissions that apply in every recipe.

Throughout this book you will also learn how to optimize you applications for better performances, for example by using multi queries or batch requests.

The book is easy to read, and you don't necessarily have to go through it sequentially. Although most examples are in PHP, it's quite easy to modify the code to fit in your own programming language of choice. As a C# developer, I simply downloaded the C# SDK via the Facebook developer's site

Tip: since the Facebook API changes a lot, you should frequently check the online forum and documentation (on the Facebook developer's site) to stay up to date with changes.

If you want to build (your first) Facebook applications, this is a must have! I can also recommend this book to developers who want a broader overview of the Facebook platform and its opportunities.

I just finished reading Facebook Application Development with Graph API Cookbook. It provides over 90 recipes to create web apps with the Facebook API. The variety of topics and the amount of practical code examples makes it a useful reference for the FB API developer.

The book is structured as follows:

The first 3 chapters are a basic introduction how the API works: get the PHP SDK, set up your first (canvas) app, interacting with the social graph and how to query Facebook.
Chapters 4-6 focus on Javascript: chapter 4 introduces the JS SDK, chapter 5 is about Facebook Dialogs, and chapter 6 deals with the various social plugins from Facebook that you integrate on your site (like button, activity feed, etc).
Chapters 7-9 show a bit more advanced topics: integrating web pages (chapter 7), virtual Facebook currency to actually earn money through Facebook (chapter 8) and advertising / metrics data (chapter 9).
Chapter 10 is the most fun: it shows some complete Facebook apps you can build with the API
Chapter 11 is bonus and important moving forward: it shows the Open Graph Beta that was presented several months ago at Facebook's G8.

Code samples
I didn't have time to play with all the code samples yet, but they form a great resource for both new developers wanting to get to know the framework, as well as the intermediate/advanced developer that wants to enhance his/her skills.

Writing a FB API book is more than challenging knowing that the platform is updated very often. I found my FB apps broken this week because I didn't anticipated the oauth2 change that went live (announced on the Facebook developers blog). This might be an issue with the code samples, because I didn't see the "oauth: true" in the FB.init calls, which was the change I had to put into my apps last weeks to make them work again (more info about the fix here). Another example is the depricated $facebook->getSession() on page 15 of the book (now: $facebook->getUser() in PHP SDK 3.1) which I spotted on the author's blog post comments.

This seems inevitable, and it means you need to be prepared to have the API documentation at hand and tweak (but hey ... isn't this the best way to learn anyway?). As the book is from November this year, there won't be many of these issues, but in 1 or 2 years time there might be, so probably it would be a good idea to release an updated version of the book by then.

Kudos to the author for the amount of samples. I also think he did a good job of explaining them, and adding other technologies like PHP GD (image creation) and jQuery to pretty up the examples.

Writing style and structure
The book is easy to read/follow. It goes through the concepts in a logical order, building new examples upon previous ones. It is not necessary to read it sequentially though. There are backreferences to prerequisites, so with some experience you can easily jump in anywhere. As with most of Packt's cookbooks the structure for each recipe is: "get ready -> how to do it -> how it works -> references", as with Yii's cookbook, this worked pretty well for me. It allows for both quick scanning of code (after all a cookbook really is a reference work) as well as detailed study of the examples.

Open graph
I liked the fact that the author paid some attention to the Open Graph Beta. I still have to develop my first App in it, and from what I've seen (Spotify, reading apps), it seems the way forward! Trivia: I actually contacted the author several weeks ago that I was going to read/review his title, asking him if he had seen the G8 conf and thus if he could do a chapter on the OG Beta. I got a prompt response and I am glad he put it in :)

Learning by doing
From a personal view, learning the FB API is about practicing, writing code, play with the PHP / JS SDKs and many methods the FB API has. The many examples suits this purpose well. Again, things change fast at Facebook, and usually announcing it on their blog, so if you are developing FB apps, follow the developers blog and use this book as reference making sure you also check the latest API docs.

Conclusion
I found the content and the way it is presented very useful. Although the book is brand new, there are already some recent changes in both PHP and JS SDKs that might affect the code. So make sure you check the FB API documentation.

The advantage of this book over the API docs, is the structured format to learn the subject and clear explanations. It covers a wide range of topics in a reasonable size of 340 pages, including interesting advanced topics like virtual currency, advertising and metrics. The book's samples show a strong integration with the social graph (the real API's strength!), and a chapter on the way forward: the Open Graph Beta.

So I can recommend this title to every developer that works with the Facebook API.