Getting Started With Fluidinfo is now available in hardcopy and various eBook formats from O’Reilly. The authors, Nicholas Radcliffe (@njr) and Nicholas Tollervey (@ntoll), know Fluidinfo inside out, as you might hope. They’ve written multiple Fluidinfo client libraries, web applications, command line tools, visualizations, have written many blog posts about Fluidinfo, have imported tons of data into the system, and have both contributed to the design and architecture in many ways. The books is extremely well written. Both of the Nicholases are entertaining and clear writers.
The first chapter has a wonderful introduction and overview of Fluidinfo, and should be understandable by a broad audience. After that, things get more technical with a chapter on using Fish, a Fluidinfo shell, either from your shell command line or via Shell-fish, a web interface. Playing directly with Fluidinfo, adding to objects and running queries, is probably the best way to understand its (very simple!) data model. Then it’s on to programmatic access, using two Python libraries (one low level, one high level) and via Javascript. An example social book reader application is built from the ground up in Javascript. The book concludes with chapters on the REST API, advanced use of Fish, discussion of the special Fluidinfo about tag, and a description of the query language.
We hope you’ll grab a copy and come join us either on the fluidinfo-users or fluidinfo-discuss mailing lists, or on the #fluidinfo IRC channel on Freenode (chat right now with a web based client). We’ll be happy to say hi and to help get you going.