Beginning RSS and Atom Programming
This book offers you insight to understanding the issues facing the user community so you can meet users' needs by writing software and Web sites using RSS and Atom feeds.

Beginning with an introduction to all the current and coming versions of RSS and Atom you'll go step by step through the process of producing aggregating and storing information feeds. When you're finished you'll be able to produce client software and Web sites that create manipulate aggregate and display information feeds effectively.

OutlookPower's evaluation
Although this book was a lot longer than either of the O'Reilly books, we honestly found the O'Reilly books to be more useful. This is a good book, but it focussed way too much on specific tools (some of which are out of date, and others of which you probably wouldn't choose to use). We wish the pages were used for more on RSS and less on skills development with the tools.

Beginning RSS and Atom Programming by Danny Ayers and Andrew Watt, published by Wrox, is 775 pages and has a retail price of $39.99. We give Beginning RSS and Atom Programming a rating of 3 out of 5.

OUR RATING: 3 of 5

It's about building a feed aggregator and routing feeds to your email or iPod, producing and hosting feeds, filtering, sifting, and blending them and much more.

OutlookPower's evaluation
We love the ExtremeTech series for the simple audacity of their material. Who in their right mind wants an RSS feed sent to an iPod. But darn it all, if you're going to do it, here's how. We found a lot of "exercises left to the reader", but also found the book inspiring in terms of giving us ideas about how we could fiddle with feeds and do more. If you've been curious about what mashups are, this book provides much of the foundation of how they come together.

Hacking RSS and Atom by Leslie M. Orchard, published by Wiley, is 602 pages and has a retail price of $24.99. We give Hacking RSS and Atom a rating of 4 out of 5.

OUR RATING: 4 of 5