The promise of Facebook is simple: a unified social network, with a brilliantly developed application platform, which counts almost everyone you know as a member. "The Facebook Platform" offers developers an opportunity to build applications, which leverage a well-developed toolkit with the potential to reach tens of millions of users around the world. The tech barrier to getting involved is fairly low as the core technologies used in building Facebook applications are familiar to almost anyone who has built a web application, consisting of modified versions of HTML, SQL, and JavaScript (FBML, FQL, and FBJS respectively). The missing element for a lot of Platform novices is the strategy involved in designing successful applications, the need to architect for very sudden scaling challenges, and the ability to design with the costs of hosting and deployment in mind."Learning the Facebook Platform" is, generally speaking, a question of applying existing skills within a novel context. The biggest problems for most would-be Facebook application developers are knowing how and where to start, as well as how to build an application, which will stand out and be noticed among the thousands of other apps. This book will solve both problems by providing easy to follow recipes that will help developers to strategize and design their application, determine the ideal Facebook integration points to leverage, architect and build their application, and market it in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

About the Author

Jay Goldman led Radiant Core's Professional Services Team on a wide variety of award winning engagements across many industries, and is now helping to change the world as Vice President of Client Experience for Zerofootprint Software, Inc. He has been instrumental in the continued growth of the BarCamp community in Toronto and was one of the co-conductors of the very successful TransitCamp event held in partnership with the Toronto Transit Commission. Jay has been published in the Harvard Business Review and is currently writing The Facebook Cookbook for O'Reilly Media.