The book is broken down into two major conceptual areas, core topics and extended topics. In core topics, RESTful services, the backbone of Twitter and many social data APIs are covered in sufficient depth for the developer to know how to structure their queries, handle asynchronous operations, utilize headers and post binary data. Continuing from an understanding of RESTful web communication, the developer learns how to request and retrieve responses from Twitter's API, with forays into data processing with XML and JSON (for REST API data), and RSS and Atom (for Search API data). In extended topics, the developer is introduced to a variety of important topics for developing their own custom applications. Caching, third party application interoperability, real time data binding, push vs. pull data scenarios, and Twitter's anatomy and constraints, are explored in detail to paint a bigger picture of how a Twitter application is designed. Following from performance and feature considerations are authentication and security, with coverage of Twitter's upcoming OAuth security model at the forefront. The reader will learn how to authenticate with the OAuth specification for web and Windows applications. Finally, readers will get an in-depth look of TweetSharp, a .NET library for developing Twitter applications that will speed up their development and time to market for their own application ideas.