RSS is one way of making sure your content and ultimately your web design will be seen by as many people as possible. Real Simple Syndication is also used for a number of other Web 2.0 applications. Steve Holzner, author of the book Secrets of RSS explains what RSS is, how it works, what you can do with it and how you can stretch the limits of its use.

The first half of Holzner’s book covers the RSS feeds themselves: how you grab one to read a news feed, and how to create one to publish a news feed. The second half of his book goes deeper into the RSS protocol, i.e. he teaches you how to set up a RSS feed from scratch, how to integrate it with your blog and how to automate it.

The book really becomes useful and interesting — at least to intermediate users — in its last third. There Holzner explains how you can extend RSS 2.x in order to include your own name spaces, how to add advertising to a feed, and more.

Holzner’s book will especially appeal to users who are proficient in HTML and CSS, but who only have a basic understanding of XML. Bloggers who don’t know how to add a podcast to their news feed will be helped by the book as well. Holzner has added a complete RSS language reference to the book, a very useful source if ever there was one.