BOOK Review - Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom

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Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom

By Ben Hammersley

RSS is a HOT technology. Most people think of RSS as a blogging technology but there’s SO much more that you can do with RSS.

O’Reilly has a reputation for producing very technical books and this one does not dissapoint.

For me this book had four important flavors.

  • RSS versions are VERY different amd Version 1 came after Version 2 – and then there’s ATOM.
  • RSS grew from RDF and RDF is a very powerful syndication model. RSS 1.0 is based on RDF, v2 is not. (The versions are NOT sequential.)
  • RSS has a rich, namespace based extensabiliy model which lets you add custom functionality to RSS1.Many extension modules are already available.
  • There’s a difference between the specs and how RSS is actually used in the “real world”. This book details the differences.

If you’re going to develop RSS based applications or work with RSS atthe XML level, this book is a MUST HAVE !