RESTful Web Services Cookbook: Solutions for Improving Scalability and Simplicity

A simple implementation of a REST API isn't that complicated. You can youtube a tutorial on the subject and get a basic idea pretty quickly. To get the general idea, you don't need an entire book explaining it to you.Likewise, the theory behind REST being stateless and so fourth... you can get that from a simple youtube video.What you DO need a book for is all these little details for how to design your API to follow best practices.That is precisely what this book provides.So I would recommend this as a first book for REST, combined with watching a few youtube videos. Afterwards I don't think you need any other books on REST. All the details you could ask for are here, and the rest is obvious.It's a bit strange to call this a cookbook. It's more like... a series of problem-solution explanations with some example code. I suppose you can use the code, but the great value of this book comes from the concepts taught.

I have not made it through the whole book, but my first impressions are really good. One of the interfaces we were designing for work is to time consuming to wait for a http response, in the first chapter of this book it gives you the way to do Asynchronous requests correctly with rest.There is also some good information on presenting resources that are not nouns, nouns are easy right you have a collection of people for example, you want to list all the people and do CRUD operations on a particular person. This to me is classical rest and is strait forward to do, but what about verbs (not in the POST, DELETE http sense) but in the give me driving directions sense. The book covers this and actually uses driving directions as it's example.There are a couple of issues I'm still trying to find covered in the book, like how to do pagination on a collection of resources correctly. There is at least one recipe on this, but I did not see how to indicate a default page size (ie I requested all user accounts, but only returned first 200 dues to size, how does the client know that 200 were returned)The other thing is the proper way to use http get parameters in search and other limiting operations. It would be nice to have some basic recipes there, but to be fair I might just not have seen them yet.All in all it's a nice addition to your technical library.

A unique book, and not what I expected. Not like any other book on any subject that I have come across. Goes through problems and describes solutions one by one. A different but very powerful teaching style. Does a great job describing *exactly* why you want to follow the very best industry practices established for HTTP/XML. Also works as a good reference to look up selected subjects.If you are looking for a book on how to use Python or Java or similar to create a REST web server, this is *not* the book for you. If you are heavy into JSON, look elsewhere, this book is XML-centric. If you are trying to understand HTTP/XML from first principles, and build the very best REST platform you can, you have come to the right place.

I had been following "What is REST" tutorials online for the last few weeks as I was working on an API for an upcoming SaaS product. Unfortunately there were still some nitty-gritty details behind the tenants of RESTful design that weren't clicking in my brain, making it hard for me to really grok if I was following the intended design guidelines correctly or just faking it like so many other services do.Picking this book up after a recommendation from an HN reader, I got 4 chapters in before the smoke cleared in my brain and I had multiple "Ah ha!" moments such that the whole concept cleared up for me in a matter of days.It could be the writing style or presentation, but I just found it really easy to digest and answering all my questions as they popped up in my head.An excellent resource for anyone else working on RESTful API design.

It would be nice if the examples are updated to include Json representation of objects in the response, rather than xml .

This book provides Web API solutions for just about any problem you may be facing. It can be used as a reference book or selectively read to give you an extensive lesson in the capabilities of Web API. All of the solutions are easily accessed on GitHub. I would recommend this book to anyone just getting started as well as the seasoned web service developer.

Returned because it was the wrong book.

This book is not for learning what REST is or how to get started with REST in a particular technology (like WCF). Instead, as written in the book, it is for designers and developers of RESTful services. However, that does not mean beginners should avoid it. For me, it's quite the opposite. I find this book very useful while I'm learning REST.I purchased this book to go along with learning WCF and creating services for Android and iOS. I knew it is not an introduction to REST. I use it to help supplement what I learn. By seeing the practical implementations, with context, in this book, I get a better understanding of how to implement REST services and how the "theory" of REST works in actual software systems. I also find it useful to rely on this book for relatively common operations. It is a great way to get started with developing RESTful services.I appreciate what this book offers. It provides a starting point for developing REST services for those who are familiar with REST but want to get started quickly. It is also similar to a design patterns book in that it describes solutions to common problems. In this way, the book allows you to skip solving the basic problems. Instead, you can adapt the solutions provided in the book to your specific situations.

Je l'ai encore lu il y a quelques mois, toujours d'actualités, ca va faire 3x et ca me sert toujours... C'est rare pour un livre d'informatique

This book simply describes the RESTful web design and semantics. By reading this book you will find the mistakes that even experienced web developers do and after reading the book you will find yourself at a different level of knowledge which will be very helpful in your next web development. I highly recommend this book to web developers who want to design and develop an scalable system.

This book is for those who understand what REST is, understand the importance of the hypermedia constraint, have maybe read "REST in Practice" (my recommended background reading), have read probably a hundred blog posts about REST... and are still slightly unsure about how to actually do it, when it comes down to the nitty-gritty detail. If you feel like that, join the club.REST is somewhat abstract, and there's no absolute right way or wrong way. Plus there's many many facets of REST that you have to consider when designing your service.And that's where this book comes in... in an abstract realm, it gives you wonderfully concrete guidance in the form of Recipes. How to do this. When to do that. Covering the main areas of concern - Uniform Interface, Resources, Representations, URIs, Linking, Atom, Content Negotiation, Queries, Caching, Security and more - there are a decent number of recipes per area that cover all the common questions and concerns that service designers have.I wanted to know how to evaluate whether Atom Syndication Format would be a good fit for my service... there's a recipe for that. I wanted to know how exactly to implement caching and conditional requests - there are multiple recipes for that.Plus there are warnings about pitfalls that could save your service... I was going to put crucial information (an API key) in a custom HTTP header, but this book informed why that's a really bad idea.In short, this book is just essential for all REST service designers and implementors. It currently sits to the side of my monitor, and I consult it many times a day when I'm working on our REST service. You're not going to want to read it from start to finish though: it's purely a reference book... an incredibly useful and practical reference book.One more thing: it pleases me to see that the wonderful Mike Amundsen contributed to ten of the recipes. Mike's a key thinker in this area, and toilers in the RESTful fields should get to know his work.

This is without doubt one of the most useful books I have found on RESTful Web Services and I constantly refer to it during my application design. Apart from being clear and well written, the best thing about this book is that it takes dozens of of examples of everyday business programming problems that you may have solved on other systems and explains how to achieve the same thing in a RESTful way. I found this book especially useful coming from a legacy background, many books give simple examples but fail to explain how to solve real-world business problems, which is where this book excels.

This is a simple reference book that is poor, not relevant if you want to design and develop RESTful web services from scratch and extremely disappointing as text. Fed up with this continuous stream of books from O'Reilly that try to get to the latest technology trend and monetise.