From making money the book next turns to news, showing how to make an RSS feed from Google search results; after that comes an example of using an open source Java job scheduler called Quartz to build a news-gathering application. This is built on top of the earlier example of how to use Google.
After news comes entertainment. The sixth project shows how to use an open source project called freedb to look up information about audio CDs, so that you can build a CD catalog. Later in the book, another project shows how to create your own Hot News Sheet to give you a single web page that shows what's news both from the mainstream media as well as the world of blogs. A final project slows how to set up a website to generate automatic daily discussions.
While the bulk of the book is devoted to hands-on demonstrations and code listings, there's a brief introduction to web services in the front, and a chapter looking at future technologies such as REST, UDDI, and Rendezvous.
If you aren't afraid to wrestle with code, and want to move beyond the simple cut-and-paste tools of Amazon Associates or Google Adwords, then this book may be what you're looking for. Not sure if you've got the background needed for the book? Check out its page at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/realwws/,
which gives a sample chapter and lets you download all the code used in the
book.
Article comments
1 - Eric Berlin
Very good review / explainer, Bruce. Thanks for this review!
2 - DrPat
I especially appreciate the threshholds of knowledge necessary to use the book's content - I wish other technical manual reviews had similar caveats (my own included).