Web APIs with PHP Book Review

eBay, Google, PayPal, Amazon and FedEx plus Web Feeds

‘Web APIs with PHP’ covers all you need to know about using some of the most popular web services on the internet including Amazon, PayPal, eBay, FedEx and more. ‘Web APIs with PHP’ also introduces you to creating your own web API.

At last there is a book about how to interact with Web APIs using PHP, there are a few other books about using Web APIs but they include programming examples which use Perl or ASP. ‘Web APIs with PHP’ covers interacting with APIs using REST and SOAP protocols, the SOAP examples use NuSOAP.

‘Web APIs with PHP’ begins with showing you how to read web feeds such as RSS and ATOM feeds as well as how to create your own web feeds and syndicate them.

‘Web APIs with PHP’ contains separate chapters for each of the FedEx, PayPal, eBay, Amazon and Google APIs. Each chapter covers each API in enough depth to get you started and retrieve and send results to the APIs. Each API is so involved that a whole book could be dedicated to each APIs so it’s no wonder that ‘Web APIs with PHP’ just covers the basics, but it does provide you with some really good usable code examples and it won’t take long for you to get results.

‘Web APIs with PHP’ contains a chapter towards the end of the book which discusses other APIs such as Delicious and Flickr. ‘Web APIs with PHP’ includes a chapter on how to create your own web API, but I did feel that this section could have taken up more of the book and gone into more detail, but this chapter does give you enough information to get you started with creating your own web API using REST or SOAP.

‘Web APIs with PHP’ is a great book if you want to get started using any of the major web APIs such as Amazon, Google and eBay and you obviously program in PHP. ‘Web APIs with PHP’ is a good read and contains some good code examples which I’m sure you will use and learn from.