Paris Graphics

I recently posted a Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services (Expert’s Voice in Web Development)full review of this book on Amazon but here’s an overview.

If you haven’t been exposed to Mashups yet (or maybe you have but haven’t heard the term), a Mashup is when you use data from one or more source to create something new. A simple example would be taking a set of geo coded Flickr pictures and mapping them on Google Maps or Earth. As the author notes, the Programmable Web site is a great place explore Mashups as well as find APIs.

This book came at the perfect time for me as I have been trying to come up with new ideas to introduce into extra-curricular student technology activities. In my opinion, there’s no point in teaching students how to create websites except perhaps to those who really want to go into that area. Most students are already familiar with “publishing” in some form be it Blogger, Wordpress, Facebook, MySpace, etc. If they want to continue to publish to the web, they will most likely use some kind of CMS (unless they go into web development as a profession). What we have is a growing amount of content that is available. Tons of data and more and more we find that the data is either in a ready to use format like XML or that there’s an API to get to the data. So… with this increasing amount of data and some knowledge of how to create a Mashup, you can put that data to work in a way that is most useful for you. That’s where this book comes in.

The book is extremely thorough and very well written. There is material for those with no programming experience, teaching them how to create Mashups and Remixes with GUI tools like Yahoo! Pipes as well as other simple techniques. For those who already have some programming experience or are learning, there are chapters delving into various API’s, PHP for XML processing, AJAX/Javascript widgets and much more.

I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the topic - it is really excellent.

My full review as well as those of others is Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services (Expert’s Voice in Web Development)here.