Product Description
"This book will not only demonstrate how developers can utilize Amazon Web services to create cool mashups but will also help them convert it to money-making mashups - 'cashups.'"
—Jinesh Varia, Amazon Web Services Developer Relations Team

Amazon.com is advancing the boundaries of the Internet through their powerful suite of web services. Innovative developers are combining Amazon data with other freely available sources to create new and interesting applications known as Mashups. This book teaches you the techniques behind mashup applications and for the first time shows you how to build them yourself.

The examples in this book show you how to integrate Amazon web services with APIs from Yahoo!, eBay, Google and YouTube. You'll learn how to combine data from disparate sources to create new applications using next generation browser techniques such as AJAX, JSON and Dynamic Scripting. You will learn how to re-purpose web service data so that it can be consumed from mobile devices such as a cell phone or PDA. Because both the theory and code are explained, you'll be able to easily take the lessons in this book to build your own killer mashup applications.

Expert web services developer Francis Shanahan guides you through the basics of web service consumption using XML, SOAP and REST. Next generation browser techniques such as AJAX are illustrated in easy to follow step by step examples. He also completes the picture by introducing advanced techniques to enhance performance such as the multi-threading web service features of ASP.NET 2.0.

With this book, you'll discover how to:

Build a generic AJAX library from the ground up
Consume publicly available APIs such as Yahoo!(r) Search, Google(r), eBay(r) and YouTube
Use SOAP to expose Amazon data as RSS
Convert Amazon data directly into JSON using XSLT
Plot Amazon.com customers on Yahoo Maps
Use the OpenSearch API to build your own search service
Access Amazon data from your cell phone using WML

Who this book is for

This book is for developers who have some prior experience with web technologies such as Javascript(r) and ASP.NET. This book covers a wide range of technologies and techniques including ASP.NET 2.0, WML, REST, RSS, SOAP, XML, XSLT, AJAX and JSON. Everything in the book is built using free tools and explained in detail, along with the source code which makes this a useful resource regardless of experience level.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 5.0 based on 5 reviews)

Great book for the target audience; the "coders"

This is a very comprehensive book that is well-suited to the target audience: professional developers who like "cutting code". Hence the five stars.

But cutting code is not the only way to develop mashups that invoke Amazon Web Services (AWS) or other APIs. In a future edition it would be nice to see more information on how you could use (for example) Yahoo! Pipes to develop mashups graphically. There are many examples of AWS being invoked in this way, but I guess that this book was published too early to take account of the 'easier' ways of developing such mashups.

So I say again: It's a good book, but not for beginners who want to develop mashups in a drag-and-drop fashion.

Tony Loton, author --
Working with Yahoo! Pipes, No Programming Required
Mashup Case Studies with Yahoo! Pipes
December 17, 2008

mashup king

this is a okay book about mashups. I was hoping for more technical details, but a great start at conceptualizing mashups used by Amazon.com.
November 04, 2008

Amazon And Beyond

The book covers more than the Amazon APIs so I recommend it if you are interested in mashups in general. I'm very keen on JSON right now and was pleased to find that covered as well. I think the author is a very good programmer who has many clever ideas like using XSL to transform XML into JSON (although using Yahoo! Pipes is easier). I'd have to say that this is one of the few programming books I've read that presented some really ingenious solutions and creative project ideas. Most books just provide uninspiring "Hello World" examples.
March 27, 2008

An excellent breadth-first approach

If you want to learn the various ways in which you can use Amazon's Web Services, this is an excellent starting point. Shanahan goes beyond "mashups" in the strict Web 2.0 sense of the term; he looks at the various ways of supporting wireless devices, and the use of the S3 storage service. The only nits (so far - I'm still working through some of the material) are that he assumes the use of Microsoft tools, and he identifies the term "JSON" with one particular style of mashup using script retrieval. (JSON is a serialization scheme which can be used for many different use cases, including RESTful interactions.) But these are minor points; this is an excellent book - and a lot of fun, too.
August 28, 2007

Excellent introduction to Amazon mashups

If you want to build applications and mashups using the Amazon E-commerce and S3 APIs this book from Francis Shanahan is a great place to start. It begins with a good overview of the ECS services and then covers useful topics like XSLT, Ajax, JSON, and mobile. Good coverage of both the Amazon SOAP and REST APIs. Includes mashup examples using primarily Microsoft tools like C# that mix with Yahoo Maps, eBay, and YouTube.

One thing you'll get here but not in a lot of other comparable books are architecture diagrams for each project. This is particularly helpful for mashups where there's often lots of integration happening at multiple layers. The illustrations help solidly conceptualize what happens where.
July 01, 2007

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