Yee's Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services

Interest in social computing in libraries is growing as more and more law libraries are implementing various Web 2.0 technologies largely by installing or using service providers for the establishment of blogs, wikis, etc. We can call these experiments in social media first generation developments to be followed, I think, by Web 2.0 mashups that are tailored to more specific applications for digital legal information collaboration. Some of these second generation developments may be created by individual law libraries, others by legal publishers, and still others by ad hoc and formal group efforts. Lee's Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services is featured below because it approaches today's Web 2.0 from a developers point of view—what are its main features, and what is available for us to use to develop applications. [JH]

Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services
By Raymond Yee

List Price: $49.99
Paperback: 603 pages
Publisher: Apress (February 25, 2008)
ISBN-10: 159059858X
ISBN-13: 978-1590598580 

Description: The modern Web is awash with data and services just waiting to be used, but how do you make effective use of all this information? The answer lies in APIs (such as Google Maps, Flickr, and Amazon Web Services) and remixing, or mash ups. Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services teaches you everything you need to create useful, dynamic real–world applications using APIs, web services, Ajax, web standards, and server–side languages. All you need to make full use of this book is basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and at least one server–side language (such as PHP or ASP.NET).

What you’ll learn

• Understand how the constituent parts of the modern Web fit together—web standards, Ajax, APIs, libraries, tagging, blogs, wikis, and more.
• Create different types of mashup, for example mapping mash ups, search functionality, calendars, RSS/Atom feeds, social bookmarking, online storage systems, open document formats, and more.
• Build Web 2.0 applications using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ajax, server–side languages, APIs, and libraries

About the Author: Raymond Yee is a data architect, consultant, and trainer. He is currently a lecturer at the School of Information, UC Berkeley, where he teaches the course “Mixing and Remixing Information.” While earning a PhD in biophysics, he taught computer science, philosophy, and personal development to K–11 students in the Academic Talent Development Program on the Berkeley campus. He is the primary architect of the Scholar’s Box, software that enables users to gather digital content from multiple sources to create personal collections that can be shared with others. As a software architect and developer, he focuses on developing software to support learning, teaching, scholarship, and research.

See also: Designing for the Social Web by Joshua Porter (New Riders Press, May 4, 2008) ($40.00, ISBN-10: 0321534921; ISBN-13: 978-0321534927)