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Hacking RSS and Atom Review by John Matlock
Getting Data off of a Web Site into Your System
Often times there's information somewhere on the web that you want to use in your own computing. Perhaps you want to look at news stories and display the headlines of what's happening today with a link to the site of the story. In the early days of the web, when you wanted to do something like that you had to do it manually or do some kind of hard coding to parse the information you wanted out of the HTML. Tedious, and if they ever change their web page you're re-doing your code.
This is the problem that RSS/Atom are intended to fix. These are standards that, when followed, present the information from a site in a standardized manner that makes it easy to parse.
First, what this book is NOT. This book does not tell you all the details about how to put RSS/Atom information up on a site. Instead, this book is on taking the information from an RSS/Atom 'page' and getting into a form you can use.
The book is broken down into three parts: Consuming Feeds, Producing Feeds, Remixing Feeds. In each part the author programs a few simple applications to show you what can be done. The programming is in Python, the operating system he uses is Linux.
The only complaint I could make about this book is that it would help the newbie to have another chapter at the beginning that talked about some common feeds and the nature of the tags they use to encapsulate their data.