Facebook IS building the social web! It has more than 800 million active users and connects more than 500 million users monthly on its Facebook Platform through devices, apps and websites (source Facebook Statistics).
With such a huge demand for content on the Facebook Platform, the requirement for developers has also grown, thus leading to more learning material being available; material especially related to tips, best practices and simple guides to help one progress with the platform.
One of the newest resources for Facebook Developers is – the Flash Facebook Cookbook by James Ford. I received a copy of this book and decided to write a short review for it while reading it.
The Flash Facebook Cookbook contains around 60+ recipes for integrating Flash applications with the Graph API and Facebook. The recipes are simple and start with the basic explanation of Facebook and Flash integration. It graduates to moderate and complex examples such as News Feeds, working with the photo albums, uploading pictures, working with events and integrating HTML5 geolocation capabilities etc.
The book does not expect the developer to know the Facebook platform, but does expect some knowledge of working with Flash Builder and the Flex framework. It uses the Facebook Actionscript 3 SDK available from Github. Apparently this version is supposed to be more community driven than the official Facebook Actionscript SDK supported by Adobe and Facebook on the Google Code repository. I’ve always worked with the official version of the SDK, so I didn’t try using the Github version with the receipes.
I think it is fair to say that the book is a good resource for Facebook development on the Flash platform for the web and desktop. It does not cover the mobile platform, although a refined developer will be able to adapt the knowledge gained from this book to multiple Flash supported platforms.
Mariam
The book is quite helpful to understand and setup of Face book API with the Flash. This book is really useful to understand the flash player’s application HTML template for Facebook Integration. This will be useful to understand how the events will be handled including the current sessions and javascript events. This book really help us to work on the permissions for the facebook and reading and writting Data by using the Graph API and loading the date using Facebook Query Language. This books helps user to understand how the comments and feedback will be loaded and added using Flash. Further, user can understand how to work on uploading, retreiving, Creating album using the uploaded images. Also deals with the membership details and other events which will help to change status details and invite friends.
This books helps us to understand all major functionalities involved in integrating the Facebook API using Flash and explains user step by step on how to proceed further with development using Flash. This really helps us out and play around with Facebook API using Flash Technology.