Described as a “developer’s guide to syndicating news and blogs”, this book covers a lot of ground in around 250 pages. Starting with a short account of the history of RSS it gives a quick overview of some feed-reading applications before getting into the nitty-gritty details of the specifications of RSS 2.00, RSS 1.0 (and earlier) and Atom.

The chapters devoted to the RSS and Atom specifications are terse and to the point. They provide a good reference to the ‘elements’ and ‘sub elements’ of a feed (delimited by paired ‘tags’ such as <link> and </link>) and brief code examples showing how to use them. This will be useful to anyone who wants to write or edit a feed long-hand or who wants to create or parse the XML of a feed programmatically; it is also useful when you need to add or edit specific elements (as is required in some feed generation programs such as ListGarden).

Unfortunately, the technology and tools relevant to RSS and Atom are moving at such a pace that a book was inevitably behind the times by the time it was printed (April 2005). The author acknowledges this problem specifically in the chapter on Atom. Moreover, Microsoft’s plans for RSS were announced after the publication of this book, so these are not mentioned at all.

One weakness of the book is the negligible discussion of feed reading and creation applications. While a few feed readers are described, the existence of ‘fill-in-the-details’ feed generation tools is barely acknowledged. It is assumed that you will normally create feeds using a programming language such as Perl, PHP or Python. If this is indeed your intention, you may find valuable tips on how to create feeds to do everything from subscribing to the Doonesbury cartoon to podcasting weather forecasts.

On the whole this book provides a valuable guide to the structure and uses of the RSS and Atom syndication formats. If you just want a simple point-and-click method of generating or reading feeds, ‘Developing Feeds With RSS and Atom’ is not for you. But if you have some knowledge of a suitable scripting language (most of the examples are in Perl) this book offers a great tutorial on creating and manipulating feeds programmatically.

You can buy this book from Computer Manuals (UK).

Huw Collingbourne

September 2005