The Google+ Book

Jennifer Murphy just published her new book, Developing with Google+, and I had the pleasure of reading an early version of it. This is a great read, I recommend it for anybody looking to learn Google+, especially if you are just starting. In this book, Jennifer teaches you how to program apps that use the Google+ API. She does it through examples that she created for her demo site, baking disasters. The book inspired a number of the posts that I created on this blog and does an excellent job of covering the Activities API, the hangouts API and more. To learn more about Jenny, you should check out her blog and follow her on Google+.

The following is the book’s description:

Would you like to integrate Google+ with an existing website, or build your own social application on the platform? Developing with Google+ takes you on a tour of the Google+ APIs, with lots of concrete examples and hands-on projects. You’ll learn how to take advantage of Google+ social plug-ins, communicate programmatically with Google+ over REST APIs, and author real-time Hangout Apps.

Over the course of this book, you’ll follow the progress of a fictional company, Baking Disasters, as it incorporates all the features of the Google+ platform.

• Make the most of social widgets such as the +1 button, Badge, and the Share button
• Use performance tuning techniques to speed up social plugins on your site
• Create your own plugins by accessing public data APIs with RESTful web services
• Transform an blog into a social web application through server-side processing
• Use OAuth to authenticate users and authorize your access to their private data
• Extend Google+ Hangouts programmatically and create your own application.