Offers hands-on tips and numerous code examples that show Web developers how to leverage content and feeds from today's top Web sites-including Google, eBay, PayPal, Amazon, Yahoo!, and FedEx
Introduces APIs (Application Program Interfaces) in general and uses real-world examples that show how to produce and document them
Explains how to use the popular scripting language PHP to create APIs that interact with unrelated applications over the Web
Examples take readers through each stage of the API process, from basic test implementations to integration with existing sites
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
Rating: - Nice for beginners
Web APIs will become more and more interesting as they provide quick and easy access to data and functions from widely known web service providers auch as Google, eBay and others. However, this book can only provide an overview - "making the first API call". It is therefore useable for beginner s.
The book is easy to read, helpful for the first steps and conatins enough scripts and examples to understand the features and see the possibilities for extension.
All together, useful but not ... Read More
Rating: - Very useful book for any PHP developers library
This book does what I like in a book. Deliver great information on a specific topic without trying to be the do-all-end-all book. It focus's on API's with PHP and does a great job at doing so. Different chapters cover different API's with a catch all chapter at the end to cover additional popular API (like National Weather Service and Flickr).
This is the kind of book where its just fun to play around with and see what you can come up with.
Rating: - Well-written tech book with substance and flavor
I approached this book expecting a reasonably good tech cookbook with some code examples I could put to use. This book is that, plus more. The book gives a very good background of web APIs, plus thoughtful discussion about -why- certain items are done a certain way. For example, discussion about non-trivial security matters, and various reasons why you wouldn't want to produce a web feed (followed, of course, by how you would produce a web feed, in various flavors).
For me, this book very ... Read More
Rating: - Not Just For Web API Programmers
The overviews are also excellent for concise functional descriptions that can be read by anyone with a general technical background. In sharp contrast to most technical books of this nature, this one is well organized, well written and very readable. It uses the PHP programming script/language to delve into specific implementation details, but the information can be readily understood regardless of the reader's specific language of choice. The material is presented in two sections. The first section ... Read More
Rating: - Terrible. This is not a how to book whatsoever
This book asumes you are already a programmer. There is no explaination of how to but rather a look at some API's out there. If you do not already know how to work with API's you will be lost. Of course if you already knew how to work with API in PHP you wouldnt have bought the book!
- Nice for beginners
- Very useful book for any PHP developers library
- Terrible. This is not a how to book whatsoever
