Customer Reviews

Restful Web Services

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

This book is a nice work on RESTful web-services, but I found the examples to be less than useful. The majority of the examples hide the true details of the creation and handling of RESTful web-services in calls to Ruby libraries. These examples give the reader no real understanding of what's actually happening under the covers and thus no platform from which to attempt to implement RESTful web-services in other languages.

It's also troubling that the authors have found it necessary to redefine already well defined industry terms and definitions in order to bolster their own arguments for REST. For instance the authors, throughout the book, repeatedly refer to all SOAP exchanges as being RPC like, which is certainly not the case. The authors make no attempt to compare and contrast real message-oriented or document-literal web-services against RESTful web-services. Chapter 10 includes one single sentence on "new WSDL features" like document/literal, which the authors admit to not covering, as encouraging the creation of RPC style web-services. At best this is simple ignorance and at worst is willful deception.

I'd recommend this book as a good resource on the idea of what it means for a web-service to be truly RESTful, but I would also advise the reader to approach this work from a critical thinking standpoint. It's obvious from reading this work that the author's have an agenda and that they are willing to alter industry standard terms and definitions in order to promote their work.

Cheers

There's a lot of material in this book - close to 400 dense pages of highly technical information. This and the ton of examples can't help but impress upon you that the authors are smart. Very smart.
The problem I have with this book is that maybe there's too much information. REST is supposed to simplify things, right? Up until this point I've read about REST in a couple of Rails book. I understand it (I think) and believe it's the wave of the future, especially after spending hours slogging through 800+ page books on JEE Web Services, WS-Death-*s (good call DHH!) and SOAs. While this book clocks in with less pages, it's still a tough read at times. And sometimes it was easy to lose sight of the forest while meandering through the numerous and sometimes-scattered trees.
Maybe that's just how tech books are; I don't know. I do know that most people are pressed for time and don't live and breath this stuff - which could explain the popularity of the "For Dummies" and "Head First" series.
Come to think of it, that's what I'd like to see: a "Head First RESTful Web Services" book. I think that would actually *help more people* to understand, and thus use, this technology.

This book very clearly sets out the case for a Resource-Oriented-Architecture. Its simiple, scalable, document oriented, with much of its value coming from the fact that operations are idempotent.
Understanding REST requires quite a shift in your thinking especially if your coming from an MOM/RPC/ORB background (as I was). This book is a superb aid in evolving your thinking on distributed computing. If you think that REST is just for simple integrations or serving up web content, read this book and you will rethink You can leverage ROA/REST to solve very real distributed computing challenges with great simplicity & elegance.
This is a must read for anyone that is serious about distributed computing.

Sure... it's got its issues: very repetitive, some glitches here & there... But overall, it's the best (if not the DEFINITIVE) guide to RESTful Web Services.

If you've used SOAP and/or other Web Services-related technologies/schemas/etc. etc. etc. you should have no problem following this. For beginners, however, it is definitely not the place to start. You will need to read-up a bit more on Web Services in general and some of the options and practices out there.

The repetition in the book isn't so bad. It drives home a lot of good points and covers quite a bit of in-depth information (sometimes too much, but it has come in handy when talking with other professionals/engineers).

To work with Web Services and not have at least glanced over this book would be a huge mistake. Just be careful: it may take you a while to get through. It does get a little boring from time to time.

For those of us who have borne the agony of delivering and maintaining "big" web services, REST architectures as theorized by Roy Fielding came as a whiff of welcome,fresh air. But, like in any fresh pastures, the oxygenating promise of simplicity pulled us in different directions leading to arguments about the degrees of RESTfulness and the fundamental principles of REST. From Amazon to deli.cio.us to flickr, RESTful API's flourish, but when compared, differ. Which raises the question: if there was a 'pure' REST architecture, what would it look like? How would you build it?
This book answers those questions more completely than any other resource out there. It has been one of the most valuable books I have held with me for it has shown me in all its glorious theory, practice and examples, how I may generate complex service-oriented behavior using simple rules. Once immersed, 400 pages will fly by. The rules were always out there, what this book does is simply to explain them to the rest of us, who have not 'got it' yet and how to play by those rules. Read the book. Chew on it. When you understand the vision and the road-map it lays out to achieve the vision, as you begin to see how you may scale those seemingly-unsurmountable web-service hurdles, you will be as glad as I am now, to have invested in this wonderful book.

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 Oriented Architecture"). Insight into HTTP methods & status codes, URI design, resources & modeling data, and pertinent examples from modern frameworks like django and rails, make this book so useful. If you're a developer and not planning on building a RESTful web service, it is still a great read. RESTful ideas can be applied to many aspects of cs/developing (distributed computing, web sites, component based engineering).

Lots of useful information about REST architecture, but the book is much too long and not well structured in my opinion.

Essentially, I would have found better to have definitions of what REST is at the beginning. I did find that chapter 5 '"The resource oriented architecture" and 8 "REST and ROA best practices" should have been merged (too much common topics) and finally, that the examples spanning over one hundred page are really too long (was it necessary to go into such details over three chapters : 5, 6, 7 ? ).

Furthermore, I did find that the book assumes too much knowledge about Ruby On Rails. Some bits of code seemed to miss some context for me.

To finish on a better note, i found chapter 9, 10 and 11 really interesting. These are nice overviews of :

- often used technologies in web services (atom, gdata, Xhtml+ microformats)

- SOAP related technologies (very nice summary) and their RESTful counterpart

- AJAX and the tricks that made it possible (XMLHttpRequest, request proxying, java script on demand, ...) and the links of AJAX with RESTfulness....