Recently I just finished reading Facebook Application Development with Graph API Cookbook, by Shashwat Srivastava and Apeksha Singh. As it’s name implies it’s main focus is building applications that interact with Facebook, specifically with using the new Graph API. It’s tagline is “Quick answers to common problems” and it does just that.

The first few chapters deal with creating a new Facebook application, explaining what the Social Graph is, and some basic overviews on how to get data from Facebook. From there it starts to delve into the Javascript SDK and gives recipes that build on each other. For example, in Chapter 4 you learn how to log a user in, the make Graph API calls, and then get into permissions.

Chapters 7, 8, and 9 deal with more advanced topics like page administration, virtual currency, and ads. Chapter 10 gives some full applications so you can see how things interact on a larger scale. The final chapter even goes over some of the newer aspects of Facebook development like the Open Graph Beta and working with the user’s timeline.

This book is very consistent in it’s layout. You get an overview of the recipe, the code to do it, and then an explanation of how it works. The authors do a good job of showing any gotchas, like the difference between when you should use the Facebook Canvas URL and your site’s URL, so that readers can avoid some easy to make mistakes.

Overall this is a very current and well laid out book. Anyone doing Facebook development will find this a great resource compared to searching through outdated material on the internet since Facebook changes their API very quickly.