My complimentary copy of Beginning RSS and Atom Programming by Daynny Ayers and Andrew Watt arrived today. When Danny asked me where he should send the book to, I thought the title was Beginning RSS, a modestly sized high-level technical tour of the RSS technology that one can read over a couple of nights. What I received instead was a huge book of over 700 pages and 32 chapters, full of technical details and advices along with screenshots and code examples in Python. Excellent stuff.

Don't let the word 'beginning' in the title mislead you into thinking that it's another fluff book because there is enough knowledge in it to let you do what Matt Mullenweg did with WordPress. Of course, you'll also need a big bucket of talents and an even bigger bucket of sweat but that's to be expected. The book should also be useful as a boat anchor after your fortunes are made with your RSS-enabled product or service.

Note that the book's cover features a scene from the famous Surprised Rabbit and the Grim Hunter story. Just kidding. I have no idea why Wrox uses consistently mediocre covers on books whose authors invested so much time and energy into.