Hacking Yahoo

The term hacking has a bad reputation in the press. They use it to refer to someone who breaks into systems or wreaks havoc with computers as their weapon. Among people who write code, though, the term hack refers to a quick-and-dirty solution to a problem, or a clever way to get something done. And the term hacker is taken very much as a compliment, referring to someone as being creative, having the technical chops to get things done. The Hacks series is an attempt to reclaim the word, document the good ways people are hacking, and pass the hacker ethic of creative participation on to the uninitiated. Seeing how others approach systems and problems is often the quickest way to learn about a new technology.

While Yahoo! itself has been around for over 10 years, it is releasing new applications, web sites, and software at a blinding pace. This book isn’t intended to catalog everything Yahoo! offers, but rather to introduce new technologies, such as Yahoo! Web Services, while showing novel ways to use perennial offerings like Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Mail, and Yahoo! Groups. Through the years, developers have scraped, poked, and prodded every corner of Yahoo! for their own uses, and the release of Yahoo! Web Services is like a welcome mat being put out for a wider audience of would-be hackers. This book intends to show you what’s possible when you view Yahoo! as a platform and inspire your inner hacker to take a new look at Yahoo!.