It’s been a while since I posted a review about a packt published book.
I was sent a copy of “Learning Facebook Application Development” by Hasin Hayder and Dr Mark Alexander Bain a while ago. The by-line description of the book is “A step-by-step tutorial for creating custom facebook applications using the Facebook platform and PHP”. It is precisely that.
Here’s my review of it:
The book was published prior to Facebook’s facelift but this doesn’t really impact on the usefulness of the book.
An overview of FBML, FQL, FBJS (a restricted subset of JavaScript and enforced for security reasons) are given along with information on how to use the test consoles, publish to news feeds, some multimedia aspects of what can be done in Facebook applications and more.
Happily the book focuses on using PHP5 for developing Facebook Applications – while there are classes available for developing FB apps with PHP4 there really is no point in doing so; especially now that official support for PHP4 was withdrawn last month.
MySQL appears to be the database system of choice for the examples and Linux/Unix oriented solutions for scheduling tasks to occur regularly are given – some Windows screenshots feature in chapter one with regard to setting up the client libraries for local development but other than that everything else is unix-centric.
I found “Facebook Application Development” more useful than facebook’s own documentation with regard to the main aspects of developing a Facebook application – it is written well and easier to follow than the online documentation and while it is true to say that the Facebook Platform is evolving I am of the opinion that Heyder and Bain’s work will still be applicable for a long time.
