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 Location:  Home » Architecture » Languages & Tools » RESTful Web ServicesMay 17, 2008  


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RESTful Web Services
RESTful Web Services
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Authors: Leonard Richardson, Sam Ruby
Creator: David Heinemeier Hansson
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Category: Book

List Price: $39.99
Buy New: $22.21
You Save: $17.78 (44%)
Buy New/Used from $18.94

Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars(28 reviews)
Sales Rank: 2939

Format: Illustrated
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 446
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.9 x 1.1

ISBN: 0596529260
Dewey Decimal Number: 006.76
EAN: 9780596529260
ASIN: 0596529260

Publication Date: May 8, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days

Editorial Reviews:

Product 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.



Customer Reviews:   Read 23 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars Essential guide for building REST Web Services   May 5, 2008
This book fills a gap that has existed for a long time. It clearly explains the advantages of RESTful architecture, It cuts through the SOAP vs. REST nonsense and helps you to understand some of the most important and poorly understood concepts of the web's architecture.


4 out of 5 stars Great (but repetitive) Guide   March 11, 2008
  1 out of 1 found this review helpful

Sure... it's got its issues: very repetitive, some glitches here & there... But overall, it's the best (if not the DEFINITIVE) guide to RESTful Web Services.

If you've used SOAP and/or other Web Services-related technologies/schemas/etc. etc. etc. you should have no problem following this. For beginners, however, it is definitely not the place to start. You will need to read-up a bit more on Web Services in general and some of the options and practices out there.

The repetition in the book isn't so bad. It drives home a lot of good points and covers quite a bit of in-depth information (sometimes too much, but it has come in handy when talking with other professionals/engineers).

To work with Web Services and not have at least glanced over this book would be a huge mistake. Just be careful: it may take you a while to get through. It does get a little boring from time to time.



4 out of 5 stars Great Info, Badddd Editor   March 10, 2008
  1 out of 3 found this review helpful

The book is full of general knowledge that anyone in Web Development should know, but the editors did a horrible job. Nice book guyz but I would definitely s-can the intern who did the error checking.


5 out of 5 stars The necessary wake-up call for developers who ignore HTTP   March 3, 2008
  2 out of 2 found this review helpful

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.



5 out of 5 stars Great Book   February 9, 2008
  1 out of 2 found this review helpful

This book doesn't give a lot of technical details, but is a great introduction to resource oriented web service design and development.


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