Content Syndication with RSS

This book really is a must-have (or must-read-once) for anyone interested in RSS syndication technology.It contains a lot of information on creating RSS feeds and related scripts. Most of the non-RSS code is in Perl, so if you don't use Perl, some of the book might not be handy.I was disappointed that the book didn't cover much of the user's end of syndication... things like scraping and RSS readers themselves, but that's obviously another book.This is a really nice title if you're interested in the techie side of RSS, but if you're an end user, there won't be too much here for you aside from the bits of history.

I must underscore the reason why I capitalized the word "PRINTED" in the title of this review. This is indeed the best book about the topic of RSS (RDF Site Summary), which has become increasingly more important since blogs jumped out of tech obscurity to become a mainstream form of web-enabled information dissemination. However, nowadays the topic is too dynamic (there's too much happening these days in the field of RSS) to make Hammersley's book a comprehensive and current enough resource for all matters and purposes. As a general introductory reading, it's the best book out there. But once you get your feet deep enough in the RSS waters, you need to go online and search for the current APIs, Web Services, News Aggregators and RSS/Blog Directories, which is the area where the book will fall behind the fast growth of this area. Overall, very well structured, even with an appendix on the XML you need to know, in order to be able to deal with RSS.

This is a useful little book; the whole main content is less than 180 pages and the author's pleasant writing style make it really easy to read in a day or two. The amount of pages isn't huge but, in my opinion, provides an effective coverage of RSS. The code listings use Perl, making them useless for people (like me) using other languages but this doesn't really affect the book too much, since the goal isn't to provide a collection of coding recipes.

Ben Hammersley does a great job introducing the history of RSS and explaining all the aspects of using RSS for syndication producers and consumers. The book's technical descriptions are very clear, aided by the author's excellent use of diagrams to illustrate the organization of RSS data elements. Another reviewer complained that Chapter 4's title including "RSS 2.0", while not discussing RSS 2.0 in the chapter's text. This was apparently an honest mistake that has no effect whatsoever on the book's presentation, as Chapter 8 is entirely devoted to RSS 2.0. I note that the Chapter 4 title is corrected in the Safari online edition of the book -- O'Reilly is really on top of updates!The author includes an excellent appendix on XML basics; you can give this book to any web developer and get them up to speed on RSS without first making them XML experts. Given the complexity of the topic, this is a top-notch book, easily worth five stars.