Customer Reviews

RESTful .NET: Build and Consume RESTful Web Services with .NET 3.5

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There are two things I really liked about Flanders' book:

(1) It has a gradual progression from concept to implementation that is both easy to read and very structured. It made the whole book very valuable. The initial section on REST is concise and either enlightening or revision, depending on what you already know. The transition to WCF programming is just as smooth.

(2) It zeroes in on the essentials and provides very lean tutorials on the meat of implementing RESTful services. This is key because WCF as a technology is fairly dense and sprawling. Flanders starts with a quick tutorial of non-SOAP based web programming using WCF. And he covers both server side API implementation and client side consumption of the same.

RESTful .NET's biggest strength is that it is concise, clear and lean. To that point, you need the basics of HTTP, SOAP, WCF, XML, C# and (briefly) ASP in place.

I like the way the author writes; however, I have a few problems with the book as a whole:
- The example code is a mess. It's badly formatted and a lot of just doesn't work. If you don't believe me, download it yourself before buying the book: [...]
- There is just not enough focus on the client (the book contains 11 chapters and chapter 10 is client code). However, the example must have been an academic exercise for the author who focused on SSDS rather than a simpler example. He would have been better off sticking to his example code and focusing more on security from the client's perceptive.

I started reading this book after finishing Data-Driven Services with Silverlight 2 so I was already somewhat familiar with the basic principles of REST services in .NET but wanted more details about the inner workings of REST and specifically the details of configuration within IIS and web.config. Well, this book definitely covers the inner workings of REST within WCF VERY throroughly, but in my opinion, the approach was kind of counter-intuitive. He begins by providing command line examples, and perhaps it is due to my overall lack of experience with WCF, but I couldnt identify with the implementation of such an example, and the details of the web.config setup were only cursorily mentioned--everything was created in code. So, my exact goal was not fully acheived, however, the advantages of this book as a reference greatly outweigh that single disadvantage. The author delves quite deeply into an explanation of behaviors, endpoints, serialization, deserialization, and the URI template syntax -- which basically are the key aspects of REST in WCF.NET. Even without a background in WCF, this book gets you up to speed very quickly.

You can configure WCF to do so many things, its good to have a book dedicated to running with one architectural style. This book has been by my desk for a majority of the last two weeks as we were prototyping heavily. Obviously if you're doing stuff with SOAP and aren't interesting in changing your style, a more general book would be more applicable.

Lots of good material covered in a concise manner. Overall, the information given here is very useful but a good amount of background WCF knowledge is assumed. The best WCF RESTful reference.

Good introduction to rest with .net. I'm a WCF dev so I can say that this book helps me a lot to design out rest API for our services consumers

This is the only book you need if you are building new web services or exposing existing one in REST style. Right on time and money. I have not seen any comparable book which talk about REST support for WCF in that depth.

Jon walks you through all the necessary steps in using REST with .NET, starting with the why, then the how. This is a soup to nuts guide, with coverage of Astoria and raw XML processing via HTTP.
I really enjoyed the chapter on Securing REST endpoints, I was struggling with this before I read the book. There is also a chapter on WF and REST that opened my eyes. I learned a lot in this well written book.

Do you want to learn about how to use the REST programming model in WCF 3.5? If you do, then this book is for you! Author Jon Flanders, has done an outstanding job of writing a book that is designed for .NET developers who are familiar with WCF and REST.

Jon Flanders, begins by introducing the basic concepts of REST. Next, the author introduces the WCF channel and programming models. Then, he introduces you to the WebGetAttribute, which is the mechanism for building resources that return read-only representations. He continues by examining the special considerations for hosting this type of endpoint. Next, the author shows you how to build and consume feeds using the WCF feed programming model. Then, he examines WCF 3.5's ability to return data as XML- or JSON-encoded results, as well as the integration between WCF and ASP.NET Ajax. The author continues by examining the WCF settings for enabling security and for creating an endpoint that is highly secure. Next, he focuses on both stateless and stateful workflow models for implementing RESTful services. He continues by taking a look at Restful service, SQL Server Data Services, and decompose it into a WCF service contract that can invoke the service through the WCF programming model. Finally, the author looks at a couple of slightly more advanced HTTP features and how to use them with your RESTful services in WCF.

This most excellent book will help you learn the ways of REST. More importantly, it will show you how to apply them when developing applications and services using .NET and WCF.

The idea of a book on RESTful WCF was very sound but it faced a few problems the main one being that the REST support in WCF isn't great. Key aspects of REST just aren't handled by WCF and unfortunately this book glosses over these issues which is a pity because key aspects of REST don't get mentioned.

I would thus recommend that in addition to this book you should look at getting a good understanding of other aspects of REST including HATEOAS. Luckily OReilly already have RESTful Web Services which to some extent covers these topics, and more general REST issues, and they also have a couple of other excellent REST books coming out soon.