Here at Adobe, I work on the Identity Platform team. We are responsible for running the main identity management platform that services all of Adobe’s customers. As part of this, we get the opportunity to solve some very interesting problems in the identity space. I’ve written about this before, but we recently underwent a large change to our identity platform to adopt the OAuth 2.0 standard for authentication and authorization. This allows our users to integrate with us much like they would with other large service providers who have also adopted OAuth 2.0, such as Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. This was a very fun project and one that I particularly enjoyed because I learned a heck of a lot about identity management and API security, as well as some of the deeper ins and outs of the OAuth 2.0 protocol. At the conclusion of that project, I was approached by the nice folks at Packt Publishing to write a book about the topic.
Introducing Mastering OAuth 2.0
I present to you, my first book, Mastering OAuth 2.0…
What does it cover?
The book covers what you would imagine: the OAuth 2.0 protocol and how to use it effectively. However, it focuses specifically on the client integration side of the OAuth 2.0 protocol. That is, this book is geared towards application developers looking to build applications that integrate with OAuth 2.0 service providers, as opposed to application developers looking to build their own OAuth 2.0 servers. This is best described by the book’s description…
“OAuth 2.0 is a powerful authentication and authorization framework that has been adopted as a standard in the technical community. Proper use of this protocol will enable your application to interact with the world’s most popular service providers, allowing you to leverage their world-class technologies in your own application. Want to log your user in to your application with their Facebook account? Want to display an interactive Google Map in your application? How about posting an update to your user’s LinkedIn feed? This is all achievable through the power of OAuth. With a focus on practicality and security, this book takes a detailed and hands-on approach to explaining the protocol, highlighting important pieces of information along the way.”
If you are an application developer looking to build a web or mobile application that integrates with any of the major service providers, like Google or Facebook, you will likely be doing it via OAuth 2.0. If so, this book is right up your alley :)
The World’s Most Interesting Infographic
One thing that I’m especially proud of regarding this book is the depth of the code and sample applications that I provide. I didn’t want to step through the learning process while building a sample application that isn’t realistic, or that no one will ever use. Rather, I decided to build an interesting, real-world, working sample application. Enter The World’s Most Interesting Infographic!
The World’s Most Interesting Infographic is the sample application that is built throughout the book. It is a web application that will, through the power of OAuth 2.0, request profile and feed data from your Facebook account and dynamically generate an infographic based on the statistics it gleans. Here is a snapshot of mine…
Log into www.worldsmostinterestinginfographic.com (or www.wmiig.com for short) to see your own infographic! Or better yet, follow along in the book and create your own application!
It’s all open-source!
Much like I do with a lot of my other projects, I’ve made the source code for The World’s Most Interesting Infographic, as well as the rest of the sample code for the book, available on GitHub. Check it out here…
Sample chapter
We’ve made chapter 1 available for free for anyone interested in checking the book out, but not sure whether it will be useful for them. You can download it in PDF form, or view it on the publisher’s interactive website…
Download sample chapter as PDF
View sample chapter on publisher website
Take a look at the sample chapter I’ve provided above, and if you like it, please consider purchasing it! As always, I love hearing from you. So do let me know your feedback in the comments too. Happy coding!
Charles
