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Restful Web Services [Paperback]

Leonard Richardson (Author), Sam Ruby (Author), David Heinemeier Hansson (Foreword)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (55 customer reviews) |
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Book Description

Publication Date: May 15, 2007

"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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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Leonard Richardson (http://www.crummy.com/) is the author of the Ruby Cookbook (O'Reilly) and of several open source libraries, including Beautiful Soup. A California native, he currently lives in New York.

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.

Product Details

  • Paperback: 454 pages
  • Publisher: O'Reilly Media; First Edition edition (May 15, 2007)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0596529260
  • ISBN-13: 978-0596529260
  • Product Dimensions: 7 x 9.1 x 0.9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (55 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #50,902 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
69 of 71 people found the following review helpful
Brilliant and Horrible July 19, 2008
Format:Paperback
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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72 of 76 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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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113 of 138 people found the following review helpful
Nearly Abysmal August 2, 2007
Format:Paperback
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
The most tedious, repetitive text I've ever read
Normally I don't contribute by writing reviews. I'm more reader than writer, but after I did plough through 250 pages of this book I feel obliged to write my first book... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Sympaticon
Most confusing book I've ever read
I had to put this book down after struggling through to the 3rd chapter, as I still didn't know what the hell REST actually was. Read more
Published 8 months ago by jbplaya
Not Bad
The author does repeats himself quite a bit but that is to really drive home the reason REST is a great idea. Read more
Published 8 months ago by L. Landwehr
Needs Better Organization
This book was hard to learn from. Early in the text the author keeps hinting at what it means to be RESTful while thoroughly discussing everything that is not Restful. Read more
Published 10 months ago by Eric C. Jones
A great book to start REST
I'd just like to say that this book is written so well that it'll catch your attention, teach you the subject and make you a fan of RESTful web services:) If you are new to... Read more
Published 10 months ago by themaelstorm
The yardstick for REST
This book, by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby, is prominently called `The Bible' with regards to REST - I think this has more to do with the fact that it's the first book on the... Read more
Published 11 months ago by Per Holst
Should be called RESTful Web Services for Ruby
The author does a good job explaining most REST concepts that a developer would need to think about. The book is worth it for that alone. Read more
Published 11 months ago by C. Wells
Not worth the time or effort
I purchased this book based on the 5 star reviews of the book. I was surprised as I got further into the book that the author spent so much time talking about all the other types... Read more
Published 15 months ago by M. Bryant
A great reference...however....
So if you want to know about REST and the how to apply, the design principles, what to do and not to do, differences between REST and the 'current' service oriented style of... Read more
Published 16 months ago by Nupul
A very powerful useful book, though its text is boring.
It's kind of a definitive guide for RESTful web service in my sense. I read this book 3 entire times. It's too useful. Read more
Published 17 months ago by raycheung
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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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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