• Beginning RSS and Atom Programming

• by Danny Ayers and Andrew Watt

RSS and Atom are specifications that give users the power to subscribe to information they want to receive and give content developers tools to provide continuous subscriptions to willing recipients in a spam–free setting. RSS and Atom are the technical power behind the growing millions of blogs on the Web. Blogs change the Web from a set of static pages or sites requiring programming expertise to update to an ever changing, constantly updated landscape that anyone can contribute to. RSS and Atom syndication provides users an easy way to track new information on as many Web sites as they want. This book offers you insight to understanding the issues facing the user community so you can meet users′ needs by writing software and Web sites using RSS and Atom feeds.

As the first book to cover RSS and Atom together, it begins with an introduction to all the current and coming versions of RSS and Atom. You′ll go step by step through the process of producing, aggregating, and storing information feeds. When you′re finished, you′ll be able to produce client software and Web sites that create, manipulate, aggregate, and display information feeds effectively.

What you will learn from this book

• What developers′ tools are available to create and customize feeds


• The various approaches to storing feed data, from XML to SQL to RDF


• Why RSS and Atom information feeds must follow the rules of XML syntax


• How XQuery and XSLT can be powerful tools for selecting and manipulating a portion of an RSS or Atom feed


• What′s required to build a tool to aggregate information from multiple feeds


• The newest use for RSS — podcasting MP3 audio files to iPods or other MP3 devices

Who this book is for

This book is for beginning programmers who have some programming experience and are looking to add information feeds to their Web sites. No previous programming experience is assumed.

"This book is full of practical advice and tips for consuming, producing, and manipulating information feeds. I only wish I had a book like this when I started writing RSS Bandit."

— Dare Obasanjo, RSS Bandit creator: http://www.rssbandit.org.

Andrew Watt is an independent consultant and computer book author with an interest and expertise in various XML technologies. Currently, he is focusing primarily on the use of XML in Microsoft technologies. He is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for Microsoft InfoPath 2003.