Twilio Cookbook: The Twilio cookbook will enable all kinds of telephone usage, including SMS, on your websites. It's a totally practical guide with a hands-on approach to help you dig deep into the enormous potential of telephone facilities on the Web.

Roger Stringer

$22.99 ~~$32.99~~

4.2 (5 Ratings)

eBook Sep 2013 266 pages 1st Edition

Roger Stringer

$22.99 ~~$32.99~~

4.2 (5 Ratings)

eBook Sep 2013 266 pages 1st Edition

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Key benefits

Teaches software developers to programmatically make and receive phone calls and send and receive text messages using Twilio's web service APIs
The only book that teaches you how to set up your own conference calling system or how to build a PBX for your company, or how to build a local solution that can tell you the weather where you are
Part of Packt's Cookbook series: Each recipe is a carefully organized sequence of instructions to complete the task as efficiently as possible

Description

Have you ever wanted to integrate phone features into a project you were working on? Maybe you wanted to send SMS messages to your customers about the latest sales? Maybe you want to set up a company directory with voice mail? Or maybe you want to add two factor authentication to your web sites to verify your users? Since Twilio was launched in 2007, developers have had a way to do these tasks. The power of Twilio's API is huge and lets you add any type of phone solution to your web site from 2-factor authentication for verifying your users, to setting up a company directory and a voice mail system. The possibilities are endless. "Twilio Cookbook" is your Swiss army knife for Twilio development, providing you with a number of clear step-by-step exercises. It helps you take advantage of the real power of the Twilio API, and gives you a good grounding in using it in your websites. This book looks at the Twilio API, and breaks down the mystery and confusion that surrounds adding telephone functionality to your websites. As you go through the recipes, you will learn how to take advantage of the Twilio API quickly and painlessly. You will learn how to build your own IVR system, company directory, and voicemail box, and also how to set up a 2-factor authentication system to verify users, track orders via SMS, send surveys using SMS, allow users to buy phone numbers, set up and delete sub-accounts, and check to see if a human is answering a phone call. We will also combine Twilio with other APIs to build a handy local search system such as a local business search, movie listings search, and web search. If you want to take advantage of using Twilio's API to add telephone functionality to your websites, then this book is for you. "Twilio Cookbook' will leave you with a black belt in Twilio development and enable you to integrate the API into your websites.

Who is this book for?

This book is great for developers who already have knowledge of PHP and MySQL and who want to learn about integrating Twilio's API into their websites for telephone solutions.

What you will learn

Add 2-factor authentication to your web apps to verify your users
Set up a company directory
Buy a phone number
Conduct surveys using SMS
Set up a conference calling system
Use APIs to build a local search system for finding businesses, movies, and weather forecasts
Delve into SMS messaging and learn how to set up order tracking, bulk SMS sending, and a group chat system
Set up an appointment reminder using SMS
Build an interactive IVR menu system
Build your first PVR
Learn about OpenVBX plugins to extend its existing functionality
Verify that a person is answering the phone and not a machine

What do you get with eBook?

Instant access to your Digital eBook purchase

Download this book in EPUB and PDF formats

Access this title in our online reader with advanced features

DRM FREE - Read whenever, wherever and however you want

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Customer reviews

Rating distribution

4.2

(5 Ratings)

5 star 40%

4 star 40%

3 star 20%

2 star 0%

1 star 0%

Leo Oct 26, 2013

I would definitely recommend this book to anyone doing work on Twilio.There is a section of OpenVBX which is a life saver. I got the book in Kindle edition which I think works better for a reference book like this. Twilio has good sample codes but this brings it to another level. I don't think there is another book on Twilio out there or I just couldn't find one.

Amazon Verified review

GrahamC Oct 24, 2013

I'd been planning to take a look at Twilio for a while now but other projects kept getting in this way so I was looking forward to getting my hands on the Twilio cookbook.I read the book cover to cover over a long weekend and was able to implement the recipes I needed as soon as I returned to the office.I'd thoroughly recommend this book for anyone considering implementing Twilio into their own solutions.

Amazon Verified review

David Nov 10, 2013

_Twilio Cookbook_ is a useful introduction, accessible to PHP developers at all levels, to developing apps using Twilio's telephony platform. I had no experience with Twilio before reading this book and I now feel confident that I could easily incorporate Twilio functionality into my own applications.The book is part of Packt's "Cookbook" series, so it contains a fairly structured format for each application/recipe. The format can be roughly summarized in three steps:* What we are going to do: a brief overview of the app/goal* How to do it: the code, the recipe itself* How it works: a more detailed explanation of what the code achieves The book clearly demonstrates how Twilio can be used to implement a wide variety of web-controlled telephony services, including SMS-based or Voice-based two-factor authentication, SMS-based surveys, conference calling, voice-mail with notifications, and others.In general, the recipes often boil down to:1. put a script (or collection of scripts) on your publicly accessible web-server, and2. point your Twilio phone number to that script.Like other reviewers, I would have liked to see more conceptual overview of Twilio's services. But the Cookbook format is geared towards diving right in to code and building bare-bones functional prototypes. You won't find a lot of advanced web best-practices here - there is no MVC or separation of concerns, there is very little error-checking or escaping of user input, the HTML is un-styled, bare-bones links and forms, there are variables in global scope, etc. As such, the recipes are not really suitable for production use.But for the purposes of the book - demonstrating the core functionality of the Twilio system - stripping out all those considerations is actually beneficial, resulting in a clear exposition without any of those potentially distracting (though definitely necessary) aspects of general app-development.In summary, _Twilio Cookbook_ successfully does what it sets out to do. It demonstrates how to implement a wide range of telephony functionality using PHP and Twilio.

Amazon Verified review

Aaron Oct 22, 2013

Some people hear about Twilio and immediately think of all the custom code that they can write.Other people just have a quick problem that they want to solve. This is the book for those types of people.It's a great guide for anyone that's heard about Twilio but doesn't quite know where to begin.I thought that the chapter on building an SMS survey app could easily save thousands of dollars in development costs. Grabbing the author's code as a foundation and then building on top of it is a great way to ship a minimal viable product.Advanced Twilio developers will probably have their own set of "recipes" so this book won't be as useful to them.Overall, the Twilio Cookbook is a very practical, hands-on guide to quickly building some of the most common Twilio use cases. If you want to get your feet wet with some real-world Twilio applications, definitely grab this book.

Amazon Verified review

Roy Buyuksimkesyan Oct 06, 2013

For all of you who are lazy and who do not want to read the full review here is a resume:If you need a crash course on Twilio and if you keep in mind that code you will see in the book is for education purposes only, that's a good book that contain solid, tested-and-true recipes. But if you have some spare time to look around the Twilio API and some expertise with PHP I don't think this book will give you a lot and it might even frustrate you in some points (I especially hated the first two steps in every recipe which are the same).Now let's go on with a little bit of detailed review.Book contains 60 recipes to do simple tasks to complex ones. Source codes for all the recipes are given and they are actually easy to follow. But this book does not contain an overview of the Twilio API only methods used in the recipes. An overview of how the Twilio API works, how the authentication is done, how the library communicates with the actual API or what are the most used classes and functions could have been included. Even if it's a cookbook I think I expected such a part that contained basics should have existed.Source codes could definitely have been better. I would understand writing HTMLs and PHP codes together to keep simplicity but executing queries without escaping parameters is not acceptable for me. That wouldn't have added complexity to the source codes but also provided newcomers who just copy and paste things some kind of awareness and security. I have even noticed the usage of "extract" function which might be very harmful for a novice who is not aware what it does.The idea of tested and true functions is good and it's definitely the main difference between the code you find from the Internet and the the code you will find from this book. It will also give you some insight on what can be done and how but that's all. Some of the recipes caused some sense of unease for me. The recipe containing the Bulk SMS could really be harmful when you want to send an sms to hundreds of people. I think such a warning could have been nice.I'm not really fond of cookbooks. The source code used in the books tend to become oudated pretty fast and when the source code is outdated book is not useful at all. There aren't any basics in the book which will give you a cause to keep the book in your library. To keep the source codes as short as possible and simple as possible, the practices used in the book are not state of the art etiher which might have been a use case for the book to give you an idea of the best practices to use the Twilio API etc.I would have liked a part which included what you cannot do with Twilio, or what kind of workarounds you need to do to overcome a problem. But this is a cookbook so it's not actually the purpose of this book.Returning to the resume, if you don't forget that you can't just copy paste the code used in this book for your production environment, this book will definitely give you a good idea on what Twilio can do. It will be a crash course for a seasoned PHP developer. It will definitely be helpful for anyone who wants to implement some simple tasks with Twilio which will be used by themselves and not by some end user. This book will definitely give you an "idea" on how to implement things but that's it.

Amazon Verified review

Twilio Cookbook: The Twilio cookbook will enable all kinds of telephone usage, including SMS, on your websites. It's a totally practical guide with a hands-on approach to help you dig deep into the enormous potential of telephone facilities on the Web.

What do you get with eBook?

Twilio Cookbook

Chapter 2. Now We're Cooking

Introduction

Tracking account usage

Getting ready

How to do it...

Screening calls

Getting ready

How to do it...

Buying a phone number

Getting ready

How to do it...

Setting up a voicemail system

Getting ready

How to do it...

Building an emergency calling system

Getting ready

How to do it...

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Twilio Cookbook: The Twilio cookbook will enable all kinds of telephone usage, including SMS, on your websites. It's a totally practical guide with a hands-on approach to help you dig deep into the enormous potential of telephone facilities on the Web.

What do you get with eBook?

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