Restful Web Services

The term "REST web service" is often abused. This book gives a very clear idea of what true RESTful web services should be like (and even goes as far as to propose a "Resource Oriented Architecture"). Insight into HTTP methods & status codes, URI design, resources & modeling data, and pertinent examples from modern frameworks like django and rails, make this book so useful. If you're a developer and not planning on building a RESTful web service, it is still a great read. RESTful ideas can be applied to many aspects of cs/developing (distributed computing, web sites, component based engineering).

RESTful web services is one of the (very) few books I read from start to finish without browsing the ToC for "more interesting" chapters than the one I was currently reading. From a writers perspective, this book is executed flawlessly: great organization of content, good segues that keep the flow, fun to read, etc. The title, however, should be "HTTP used correctly". Of course inventing a new term and world is more fun for everybody involved :) But this is what you will find in this book: An accurate description of the most popular application protocol that runs on top of the most widely-used transport protocol (TCP) on your internets. And enough information to show the SOAP/RPC-over-HTTP guys what they have been abusing for a decade. At some point before I read this book I was getting extremely annoyed by the "RESTful means your web application has to have nice URLs" statements everybody around me started to make. I then wrongly accused the REST proponents of spreading that kind of misinformation. I basically put them in the same drawer as the SOAP guys, people who just wanted to create new jargon to push some new nonsense methodology, wrapper, or layer; because they profit from more complicated software stacks in one way or another. So I finally decided to read up on what "RESTful" really means, and after finding more hand-waving and misinformation on wikis and blogs, I decided to read this book. What a surprise, these guys really want to show everyone how to use HTTP properly. Of course that would be great, and this book is the Manifesto this movement really needs.

This book very clearly sets out the case for a Resource-Oriented-Architecture. Its simiple, scalable, document oriented, with much of its value coming from the fact that operations are idempotent. Understanding REST requires quite a shift in your thinking especially if your coming from an MOM/RPC/ORB background (as I was). This book is a superb aid in evolving your thinking on distributed computing. If you think that REST is just for simple integrations or serving up web content, read this book and you will rethink You can leverage ROA/REST to solve very real distributed computing challenges with great simplicity & elegance. This is a must read for anyone that is serious about distributed computing.

Every IT generation has its seminal tome that transcends time and connects the dots in a way that no book had before it. For the object oriented generation in the 1980s, it was the Gang of Four (GoF) book. For the application architecture generation in the 1990s, it was Fowler's book on patterns (PoEAA). "RESTful Web Services" will be, in my opinion, that book for the 2000s Web services generation. There is something absolutely special about this book that readers of GoF or PoEAA will immediately recognize and appreciate. The book covers a breadth of technologies and ideas yet it helps the reader see how they all connect. It uses short code samples (in Ruby, the choice of this generation) to illustrate rather than obfuscate the ideas. Most importantly, it makes the complex comprehensible and delivers epiphany-like experiences throughout the book. There are too many highlights in this book to enumerate in this review. However, some of the coverage that I appreciated most included: * The chapters on resource-oriented design, since there was practically no written information available on this topic prior to this book * The chapter on resource-oriented best practices * An overview of the service building blocks, including the different representational formats and WADL, which I wasn't aware of * The chapter comparing and contrasting RESTful services with the "Big" (e.g. SOAP) service overhead that is common in most enterprise environments I would have liked to see this book touch on simple POX versus true REST and handle the resource-oriented security concerns in a bit more detail but you can only ask so much of any one book. I'm fairly confident that "RESTful Web Services", like the seminal tomes that have gone before it, will become assumed reading for IT professionals and will be found on bookshelves in cubes across the world.