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Restful Web Services (Paperback)

~ (Author), (Author), David Heinemeier Hansson (Foreword)
Key Phrases: service implementation, web accelerator, neap service, Mount Rushmore, Bad Request, Resource-Oriented Architecture (more...)

4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (40 customer reviews)

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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.

About the Author

Sam Ruby is a prominent software developer who has made significant contributions to the many of the Apache Software Foundation's open source projects, and to the standardization of web feeds via his involvement with the Atom web feed standard and the popular Feed Validator web service. He currently holds a Senior Technical Staff Member position in the Emerging Technologies Group of IBM. He resides in Raleigh, North Carolina.

David Heinemeier Hansson is a partner in 37signals and the creator of the Web-application framework Ruby on Rails. For his work on Rails, he won Best hacker of the Year 2005 at OSCON from Google and O'Reilly, in 2006, he accepted the Jolt award of product excellence for Rails 1.0

Product Details

Paperback: 446 pages
Publisher: O'Reilly Media; illustrated edition edition (May 8, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0596529260
ISBN-13: 978-0596529260
Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7 x 1.1 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (40 customer reviews)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #10,758 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

#7 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Computer Science > Systems Analysis & Design
#9 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Hardware > Design & Architecture
#20 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Web Development > Web Services

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Sam Ruby

Leonard Richardson

Inside This Book (learn more)

Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
service implementation, web accelerator, neap service, activeresource client, delicious web site, scoping information, browser security model, incoming representation, private bookmarks, bookmarks tagged, algorithmic resources, social bookmarking application, subordinate resource, posting history, recent bookmarks, controller exposes, tag vocabulary, real web service, bucket name, canonical string, human web, uniform interface, web service client, request signing, bookmarking service

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Mount Rushmore, Bad Request, Resource-Oriented Architecture, Google Maps, Services Different, The Building Blocks of Services, Designing Read, Big Web Services, Best Practices, Resource Design, Moved Permanently, Atom Publishing Protocol, Split the Data Set, United States, Writing Web Service Clients, Internet Explorer, Write Resource-Oriented Services, Google Calendar, Making the Request, Prepackaged Control Flows, Design Your Representations, What's Supposed, Internal Server Error, Once Exactly, Clients Made Transparent

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	4% buy RESTful .NET: Build and Consume RESTful Web Services with .NET 3.5 4.3 out of 5 stars (9) $26.39

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Customer Reviews

40 Reviews

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
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4.4 out of 5 stars (40 customer reviews)

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47 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good but pedantic and repetitious, August 29, 2007

By	Alberto Accomazzi (Cambridge, MA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Ok, the concept behind the book is valid: let's have computers use the web the way it was intended to be used, and if everybody sticks to a small set of reasonable design rules, we'd all be better off. But why does it take 400 pages for the authors to drive that point home (over and over again)? 70% of the content seems "filler" material, which has been put in just to turn this into a book. True, there are code examples that may be helpful to some beginner programmers, but I'm still left feeling that this could have been a well-written, 3-chapter book about 100 pages long.

I'm still glad I read it but found the blabbing rather frustrating. My 2c.

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29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant and Horrible, July 19, 2008

By	Lars Tackmann (Copenhagen, Denmark) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

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94 of 113 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Nearly Abysmal, August 2, 2007

By	Evan Dower (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

1) The editors were apparently on vacation. There are numerous errors including several typographical errors that a simple spell-check would have caught (words like "ang" and "extrenal") and a number of ungrammatical sentences.
2) The authors frequently make best practices statements without actually supporting them with evidence or otherwise explaining what makes them best practices.
3) There's really only about 100 pages of content. The other three quarters of the book is repetition. For example, chapters 4 and 8 seem to be the same. There is even a specific example regarding content language that is presented in chapter 4 and not referred to but simply repeated in chapter 8.

This book could be obsoleted by a brief 3 part tutorial perhaps combined with a half-hour slide show.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars eye opener
RESTful Web Services is one of the best books I have recently read. Before starting reading I have attended a few presentations on REST and I naively thought I became quite... Read more

Published 1 day ago by Jakub Milkiewicz

4.0 out of 5 stars liked it
Havent gone through the entire book but first few chapters are really good in explaining what is restful services.. good for beginners

Published 2 months ago by M. Raman

4.0 out of 5 stars Very interesting
This book is very interesting and made me realized a lot of stuff about how we sould use the web (as it was designed and why we should respect more the RFC 2616). Read more

Published 3 months ago by M. Thomas Boquet

5.0 out of 5 stars A ReST Manifesto
This is both a manifesto for what the authors term 'REST-Oriented Architecture' (ROA), and a technical dive into the mechanics and semantics of REST. Read more

Published 5 months ago by David Hume

1.0 out of 5 stars Disappointed with all those 5 Stars
Bought the book seeing all the five star reviews, but was kind of disappointed. Too much fluff. The author could have done without all the bashing of Big Company (Microsoft) SOAP... Read more

Published 7 months ago by Elar Alexander

5.0 out of 5 stars A good read for every web programmer
The term "REST web service" is often abused. This book gives a very clear idea of what true RESTful web services should be like (and even goes as far as to propose a "Resource... Read more

Published 9 months ago by N. Good

5.0 out of 5 stars nice book
I received this book in three days, which was a fast delivery. I am still working on this book, but I must say I like this book.

Published 11 months ago by Yanhua Yu

4.0 out of 5 stars Solid Coverage of An Important Platform
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. Read more

Published 13 months ago by Gordon Rios

5.0 out of 5 stars Lots of information... Very great book
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... Read more

Published 14 months ago by Louis-pierre Dahito

3.0 out of 5 stars mainly for Ruby programmers
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... Read more

Published 15 months ago by Carol Mcdonald

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