What this book covers

Chapter 1, Getting Started with Flash and Facebook: This chapter deals with downloading the Facebook ActionScript 3 SDK, registering a new Application on Facebook.com, getting your Flash Builder development environment set up, and getting ready to start working with the Facebook APIs.

Chapter 2, Authenticating with Facebook: Our application can't do much unless it's first authenticated with Facebook, so this chapter covers logging in, logging out, and tapping into existing Facebook sessions, for both Flash Player and AIR-based projects.

Chapter 3, Working with Facebook Permissions: Even authenticated, our application can't do much without the correct permissions, so this chapter covers processes, tactics, and strategies for working with and requesting those Extended Permissions for Facebook users.

Chapter 4, Reading and Writing Data with the Graph API: A generalized introduction to working with the core Graph API, including retrieving specific objects, multiple objects, and object connections; searching for data, limiting and paging results; and an introduction to creating and managing data with the Graph API.

Chapter 5, Loading Data with FQL: FQL is the SQL-like syntax for retrieving data from Facebook, and with it we can retrieve far more specific data than we can with the Graph API, including data that is unavailable via the Graph API.

Chapter 6, Facebook News Feeds and Status Updates: In this chapter, we look at loading Facebook News and Profile Feeds, creating new Status updates and Links, and adding custom actions to links to help promote your Facebook application.

Chapter 7, Comments and "Like this": Following on from the previous chapter, we look at loading, creating, and deleting Comments for Graph API objects, and the same for 'Likes', with both Graph API objects and web URLs.

Chapter 8, Working with Photos, Albums, and Tags: In this chapter, we'll load Photos from the Graph API—both photos of the current user, and photos from the current user. We display these images and overlay Facebook tagging information, and use the Flash Player to upload new images on the user's behalf.

Chapter 9, Working with Groups and Events: In this chapter, we retrieve Facebook Group and Event information, locate them on a Map, create new Events, and respond to Event invitations on the user's behalf.

Chapter 10, Checkins with Facebook Places: In this chapter, we download and integrate the Google Maps components and use them to plot Checkins and Facebook Places. We work with the Geolocation capabilities of HTML5, and use them to search for nearby Facebook Places and create new Checkins.

Chapter 11, Bridging the Flash and Application Gap: Finally, we'll look to improve the integration between your application and Facebook—imitate the Facebook.com website interface, use native dialogs to bypass the need for Extended Permissions, and develop a new class to simplify the authentication and permissions management for our application.