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RESTful Web Services | 
 enlarge | Authors: Leonard Richardson, Sam Ruby
Creator: David Heinemeier Hansson
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Category: Book
List Price: $39.99
Buy New: $26.39
You Save: $13.60 (34%)
New (41) Used (13) from $10.08
Rating:  33 reviews
Sales Rank: 6230
Format: Illustrated
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 446
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 7 x 1.1
ISBN: 0596529260
Dewey Decimal Number: 006.76
EAN: 9780596529260
ASIN: 0596529260
Publication Date: May 8, 2007
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 28 more reviews...
 Solid Coverage of An Important Platform October 14, 2008
Useful not just as a guide to working with web services but also provides a solid overview of what constitutes a good computing platform in general. Restful web services are more important and useful than most people realize but this book provides an immediate update for anyone working in computing.
 Lots of information... Very great book September 6, 2008
It took a while before I decided to read this book... Let me say... There's a lot of information that helped me understand various concepts... It's not just about REST... it's also about all the different architectures that make the Web we currently know and use. The Author explains and compares in details, giving lots of code examples in many languages. I personally code with Ruby on Rails, but it's not just about Rails, it's about Django, etc... (framework) and other programming languages than Ruby(Python, Java, etc...).
For the first time, I clearly understand how to create programs that can be read and understood by several MACHINES (computers) via the HTTP protocol...
This book goes as far as giving you tips on how to use your HTTP library to make your program be able to communicate with machines... I love it.
 mainly for Ruby programmers July 30, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
The title should be re-written RESTful web services for Ruby programmers. I didn't realize before buying the book (I bought it online) that almost all of the examples are in Ruby. I don't know Ruby very well, and I really would prefer more examples in Java and Java Script
Brilliant and Horrible July 19, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
Packed with all sorts of knowledge about REST, HTTP and AJAX this book will make you very capable at building well designed RESTful web services. Any topic imaginable is covered, from obscure ways of handling transactions, to Apache proxies, service implementations in Rails and the limitations of the current browser security model.
While this is all good and useful stuff, it also scatters the books focus, which eventually turns out to be its major problem. The topic orientation simply sucks. I would recommend reading the book in this order:
* Core knowledge
- Introduction, Chapter 1 and 3
- Chapter 4, 8, 9
- Optional: chap 10 (comparison to SOAP).
* REST service examples
- Chapter 5, 6 and 7
* REST clients
- Chapter 2 and 11
The service examples (chapter 5 - 7) should really have been one chapter. The client chapters does not show how to write clients against the provided example services, which is a major mistake. The core knowledge scattered throughout chapter 4, 8 and 9 (like the ATOM publishing protocol which is covered multiple places) should be collected and ordered.
So why the four starts ?. I have to admit that my annoyance with the books topical layout is trumped by the authors knowledge and their ability to pack a surprising number of usable facts into this book. So if you do not loose your way in their topical jungle then you will eventually come through as a REST maven.
Must-read for web 2.0 developers June 2, 2008
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book is an outstanding exposition of what makes a web service RESTful, as opposed to RPC-based, why RESTful is important, and how achieve RESTful-ness. The exposition is clear and the examples are helpful and to the point. Best of all, it's a gripping read, and how often can you say that about a book on software methodology and architecture?
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