This book is not about the minutia of RSS and Atom programming. It's about doing cool stuff with syndication feeds - making the technology give you exactly what you want the way you want. It's about building a feed aggregator and routing feeds to your e-mail or iPod, producing and hosting feeds, filtering, sifting, and blending them, and much more.
serially enthusiastic, caffeine-dependent {web,mad,computer} scientist and {tech,scifi} writer working for the Mozilla Corporation and living near Ann Arbor / Detroit in Michigan
Unfortunately, there have been no good books on RSS and Atom published since this one - over 5 years ago. Beware that you may get the concepts from this, but some of the code, especially that which uses outside web sources, no longer works.