A ground-up guidebook for developers—whether they are looking to write the next Scrabulous or tap into the massive amounts of information contained within the Facebook social network—this manual provides the basics first, and later explores specific aspects in greater detail. It thereby acts as a quick-start guide for aspects such as authentication and wrappers while also featuring specific chapters on topics that need more explanation, such as Facebook"s special version of HTML. Pointed examples demonstrating the exact functionality of those aspects of the application programming interface and discussions of common pitfalls and over-saturated applications are also included.