38 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Finally: an introduction to REST from the right perspective., November 22, 2010
This review is from: REST in Practice: Hypermedia and Systems Architecture (Paperback)
I started my REST journey with the two popular O'Reilly books ("RESTful Web Services" and "RESTful Web Services Cookbook") but found that they started a little too deep into the technical details and were missing the view from 30,000 feet. Sure, I learned stuff in those books about content type negotiation, the semantics of HTTP verbs and whatnot, but I was missing a really compelling answer to the question, "Why should I choose REST for my application architecture?".
At the same time I was reading about REST online and kept seeing lots of references to a mythical, magical thing called "Hypermedia As The Engine Of Application State" (HATEOAS) which lots of bloggers were effusive about but none of them could articulate very well. I was intrigued, but I wasn't convinced.
Luckily a colleague of mine mentioned this book to me and said it answered all of my questions, and he was right. Within a couple of chapters, it was obvious that the authors had made a real effort to explain not just what REST is but *why* it represents a significant shift in architectural thinking in software design. I quickly learned what REST really is and what it isn't. Most importantly I learned how it can be leveraged to build distributed systems that don't suffer from so many of the problems found with "classic" middleware technologies and architectures based on things like CORBA, DCOM, RPC, and so on.
After reading this book I returned to those two O'Reilly books and found they were much easier to follow and made far more sense. Having the architectural basis and benefits of REST explained properly by "REST in Practice" really accelerated my learning while reading those other books (which rely much more on code snippets and HTTP payload discussions rather than the underlying concepts).
If you're tasked with building a REST system or would like to figure out if REST is an appropriate approach for your designs, then this book is for you. If you're a script kiddie who just wants to learn how to write another Twitter client for the iPhone, this book may be overkill.
Building a RESTful system is much harder to do than simply consuming one that already exists. Designing a simple, usable RESTful system that properly follows the HATEOAS principle and remains easy for clients to consume is no small task either -- but this book helps immensely in that regard.
For making an architectural topic that is so poorly described elsewhere so tremendously easy to understand, this book easily gets five stars.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Solid Book for Learning about REST, November 21, 2010
This review is from: REST in Practice: Hypermedia and Systems Architecture (Paperback)
This book provided a clear and concise overview of how to apply REST architectural principles to enterprise development. The books starts from the basics and in each chapter adds a new layer of sophistication to build a simple but complete business process with REST. I was especially interested in the sections that detailed how to use REST principles to handle enterprise integration tasks instead of using expensive proprietary middleware. I also liked the chapter on security which detailed how to use OpenID and OAuth to handle authentication and authorization respectively.
I would recommend this book to anybody looking for a good practical example of building a REST services.
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12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Look at the Title, November 15, 2010
This review is from: REST in Practice: Hypermedia and Systems Architecture (Paperback)
I read the comment about the "skip it" advice. I guess it applies to some people, but not all.
There is another book, the RESTful Web Services Cookbook: Solutions for Improving Scalability and Simplicity (
RESTful Web Services Cookbook: Solutions for Improving Scalability and Simplicity) is an excellent book for the ones looking for quick recipes like the authentication. But that is a reference book, not a walk-through one.
If you like a book that walks through implementation of a simple REST service, discussing all the detail, pros, cons, going from an immature implementation to a more robust one, adding complexity, transactions, security and such, REST in Practice is the book. As the title implies, it is not a theoretic discussion, but a hands on explanation. It is a very small service, the book will not show a full blown, enterprise level system, as that is not the goal. It works on the tactical and implementation level. The code will not be usable for your own system in full, but the reader will certainly find some very good explanations and answers to general questions.
There is of course the need of an architectural level book about REST. This is not it. Hope O'Reilly will support one soon.
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