| | |  | Books | Home » » Restful Web Services | | | | | | | Description: | | "Every developer working with the Web needs to read this book." -- David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the Rails framework
"RESTful Web Services finally provides a practical roadmap for constructing services that embrace the Web, instead of trying to route around it." -- Adam Trachtenberg, PHP author and EBay Web Services Evangelist
You've built web sites that can be used by humans. But can you also build web sites that are usable by machines? That's where the future lies, and that's what RESTful Web Services shows you how to do. The World Wide Web is the most popular distributed application in history, and Web services and mashups have turned it into a powerful distributed computing platform. But today's web service technologies have lost sight of the simplicity that made the Web successful. They don't work like the Web, and they're missing out on its advantages.
This book puts the "Web" back into web services. It shows how you can connect to the programmable web with the technologies you already use every day. The key is REST, the architectural style that drives the Web. This book: - Emphasizes the power of basic Web technologies -- the HTTP application protocol, the URI naming standard, and the XML markup language
- Introduces the Resource-Oriented Architecture (ROA), a common-sense set of rules for designing RESTful web services
- Shows how a RESTful design is simpler, more versatile, and more scalable than a design based on Remote Procedure Calls (RPC)
- Includes real-world examples of RESTful web services, like Amazon's Simple Storage Service and the Atom Publishing Protocol
- Discusses web service clients for popular programming languages
- Shows how to implement RESTful services in three popular frameworks -- Ruby on Rails, Restlet (for Java), and Django (for Python)
- Focuses on practical issues: how to design and implement RESTful web services and clients
This is the first book that applies the REST design philosophy to real web services. It sets down the best practices you need to make your design a success, and the techniques you need to turn your design into working code. You can harness the power of the Web for programmable applications: you just have to work with the Web instead of against it. This book shows you how.
| | | Features: | |
• ISBN13: 9780596529260
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
| | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Leonard Richardson | | Paperback:
| 448 pages | | Publisher:
| O'Reilly Media | | Publication Date:
| May 08, 2007 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 0596529260 | | Package Length:
| 9.1 inches | | Package Width:
| 7.0 inches | | Package Height:
| 1.1 inches | | Package Weight:
| 1.15 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 44 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
Write an online review and share your thoughts with other customers.
 Good information, but not well structuredJan 09, 2010
Lots of useful information about REST architecture, but the book is much too long and not well structured in my opinion.
Essentially, I would have found better to have definitions of what REST is at the beginning. I did find that chapter 5 '"The resource oriented architecture" and 8 "REST and ROA best practices" should have been merged (too much common topics) and finally, that the examples spanning over one hundred page are really too long (was it necessary to go into such details over three chapters : 5, 6, 7 ? ).
Furthermore, I did find that the book assumes too much knowledge about Ruby On Rails. Some bits of code seemed to miss some context for me.
To finish on a better note, i found chapter 9, 10 and 11 really interesting. These are nice overviews of :
- often used technologies in web services (atom, gdata, Xhtml+ microformats)
- SOAP related technologies (very nice summary) and their RESTful counterpart
- AJAX and the tricks that made it possible (XMLHttpRequest, request proxying, java script on demand, ...) and the links of AJAX with RESTfulness....
2 of 4 found the following review helpful:
 A complete disappointmentDec 25, 2009
I have picked this book because in my course to broaden my knowledge about Web Services, I wanted to learn about REST. After all, if Amazon and eBay among others are already using it, I thought it should be important enough to get some traction in the distributed computing world.
I started to read the book with an open heart and mind to learn about REST. I was surprised that the authors spend a lot of time talking about why the WS-* web services are getting it wrong and how complicated they are and how REST based are good. They started a fight or an argument as if the reader is an opponent on the other side of the isle or as if they trying to recruit the reader to their camp. What if the reader so neutral, as in my case, and he sincerely want to objectively learn the technology, perhaps I can judge for myself at the end.
As I said, I just wanted to learn about REST, and I felt it was a complete wast of my time that I spend trying to read the first few chapters of the book.
One more minor thing but still annoying, is the fact they chose Ruby vs. any of the main stream languages for the web. (At least I found it a little distracting).
In short, what I found out, is that to learn about REST, you don't have to read an entire book. Just an article or two over the Internet would do.
DON'T wast your TIME or MONEY!!!
Thanks
 Decent overview of RESTful webservice conceptsDec 18, 2009
This is an easy read and within hours I suppose I had a good overview of RESTful webservices - in comparison to the more prevalent RPC style SOAP services.
This is not a hands on coding book for JAVA or .NET developers - only concepts and architectural principles.
Several limitations of RESTful services - e.g. lack of security etc. which are important prior to practical adoption were addressed
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Nice book for developers with Ruby experienceNov 17, 2009
It is a good buy for developers who have an experience playing around with ruby code because most of the code snippets in the book is coded in ruby. It does have java snippets but very few.
This book does cover some good aspects of restlet but don't get into any security aspects also it is little outdates at this point because it does not cover any of the JAX-RS implementations(Jersey or RestEasy).
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 eye openerNov 07, 2009
RESTful Web Services is one of the best books I have recently read. Before starting reading I have attended a few presentations on REST and I naively thought I became quite familiar with it. Now I can see how ignorant I was about it...
This book really helped me to deeply understand what REST is all about and why it is becoming so popular. The book can be thought of as a full featured, professional, step by step tutorial to REST world: starting from basic "programmable web" concepts to in-depth discussion of Roy Fielding's Representational State Transfer (REST) ideas and finally Resource Oriented Architecture (ROA). The book covers some theory but (what was the most important for me) it mainly focus on practical aspects of REST by presenting a multiple of practical advices, recipes (and gotchas) to help one design and build scalable web services. If you plan to build web services please read this book first.
| | |
|
