How This Book Is Organized

Because RSS and now Atom come in a number of flavors, and there are lots of ways to use them, this book has a lot of parts.

Chapter 1 explains where these things came from and why there is so much diversity in what seems on the surface to be a relatively simple field. Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 look at what you can do with RSS and Atom without writing code or getting close to the data. Chapter 2 looks at these technologies from the ordinary user's perspective, showing how to read feeds with a number of tools. Chapter 3 digs deeper into the challenge of creating RSS and Atom feeds, but does so using tools that don't require any programming.

The next four chapters look at the most common varieties of syndication feeds and how to create them. Chapter 4 examines RSS 2.0, inheritor of the 0.91 line of RSS. Chapter 5 looks at RSS 1.0, and its rather different philosophy. Chapter 6 explores the many modules available to extend RSS 1.0. Chapter 7 looks at a third alternative: the recently emerging Atom specification.

Chapter 8 through Chapter 11 focus on issues that developers building and consuming feeds will need to address. Chapter 8 looks at the complex world of parsing these many flavors of feeds, and the challenges of parsing feeds that aren't always quite right. Chapter 9 looks at ways to integrate feeds with publishing models, particularly publish-and-subscribe. Chapter 10 demonstrates a number of applications for feeds that aren't the usual blog entries or news information, and Chapter 11 describes how to extend RSS 2.0 or RSS 1.0 with new modules in case the existing feed structures don't do everything you need.

Finally, there are two appendixes. Appendix A provides a quick tutorial to XML that should give you the foundation you need to work with feeds, while Appendix B provides a list of sites and software you can explore while figuring out how best to apply these technologies to your projects.