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REST API Design Rulebook 1st Edition

by Mark Masse (Author)
4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 198 ratings
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In todayâ??s market, where rival web services compete for attention, a well-designed REST API is a must-have feature. This concise book presents a set of API design rules, drawn primarily from best practices that stick close to the Webâ??s REST architectural style. Along with rules for URI design and HTTP use, youâ??ll learn guidelines for media types and representational forms.

REST APIs are ubiquitous, but few of them follow a consistent design methodology. Using these simple rules, you will design web service APIs that adhere to recognized web standards. To assist you, author Mark Massé introduces the Web Resource Modeling Language (WRML), a conceptual framework he created for the design and implementation of REST APIs.

  • Learn design rules for addressing resources with URIs
  • Apply design principles to HTTPâ??s request methods and response status codes
  • Work with guidelines for conveying metadata through HTTP headers and media types
  • Get design tips to address the needs of client programs, including the special needs of browser-based JavaScript clients
  • Understand why REST APIs should be designed and configured, not coded

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  1. ISBN-10
    1449310508
  2. ISBN-13
    978-1449310509
  3. Edition
    1st
  4. Publisher
    O'Reilly Media
  5. Publication date
    November 29, 2011
  6. Language
    English
  7. Dimensions
    7 x 0.24 x 9.19 inches
  8. Print length
    112 pages
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Mark Masse resides in Seattle, where he is a Senior Director of Engineering at ESPN.

Mark has fourteen years of engineering, management, and architecture experience with The Walt Disney Company. He began his career with Starwave creating rich, interactive Java applets for ESPN Sportszone, NFL.com, and NASCAR Online. Mark architected and developed the content management system (CMS) that powers all of the Disney web sites including ESPN.com, ABC.com and Disney.com. In 2008, he received a "Disney Inventor Award" for creating a "System and Method for Determining the Data Model Used to Create a Web Page."

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ O'Reilly Media; 1st edition (November 29, 2011)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 112 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1449310508
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1449310509
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.2 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7 x 0.24 x 9.19 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 198 ratings

About the author

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Mark Masse

Mark Masse

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Mark has 20 years of experience developing large-scale network systems. He began his career with Starwave creating rich, interactive Java applets for ESPN, the NFL, and NASCAR. Mark architected and developed the content management system (CMS) that powers all of the Disney web sites including ESPN.com, ABC.com and Disney.com. In 2008, he received a "Disney Inventor Award" for creating a "System and Method for Determining the Data Model Used to Create a Web Page." In 2011, Mark led the architecture of the API management system used by Walt Disney Theme Parks and Resorts. In 2019, he founded the Purple Island game studio and developed the game Poker Squadrons, which was released in 2021.

Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars
198 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

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simerai
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book
Reviewed in the United States on November 26, 2012
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I really appreciate the pragmatic approach to REST API's. I look forward to more books like this one. The book really helped my understanding of REST and web API design in general. easy read.
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kontakte
4.0 out of 5 stars Great set of rules, just ignore the parts about WRML of you don't want to use it
Reviewed in the United States on November 2, 2014
Verified Purchase
I think this is a great book for people who already have REST experience, but need some guidelines for building their services. I lead a services design and development team and we're planning to use most of these rules as standards.
The one issue I have with the book is its use of WRML. While you can ignore the constant mention of WRML and still benefit from the book, it does get to be a little much. This wouldn't be a huge issue if WRML were a fairly well adopted standard, but it's not.
To get around this, I simply read all of rules and tried to learn the concept/essence of the rule of it used WRML. Most of them used it as a suggested implementation of the rule, so it wasn't difficult to do.
2 people found this helpful
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Michelle
3.0 out of 5 stars Pretty good when you ignore the WRML parts, but what's left?
Reviewed in the United States on February 16, 2017
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Agree with what others say about WRML. While WRML does seem to have some interesting uses as a standard, it clearly isn't a standard yet (google it and you will only get references back to the book and the author). For a book that is purporting to be a rulebook for design, promotion of a non-standard protocol is counterproductive. There are some good tidbits in terms of usage of headers for descriptive purposes and keeping urls and body mostly for content. However I found myself skipping over parts related to WRML more than I was actually reading the book.
8 people found this helpful
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Reese Wilson
5.0 out of 5 stars Great for designing *true* REST APIs (aka hypermedia APIs)
Reviewed in the United States on September 1, 2015
It is unfortunate that "REST" has different definitions, and this may be part of the reason this book has gotten poor reviews. The author does briefly mention that he fills in the gaps missing from current recommended best practices, but the significance is understated. See http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2012-02-23-rest-is-over for more about the completely different meanings.

The rules in this book are well thought-out solutions to constraints which are rarely addressed. A subset of them will appeal to people trying to write a 'REST' API based on their existing definition, but they may rebel against the added complexity related to media types such as WRML. As for WRML itself, it is just one example of how to meet the constraints of REST such as HATEOAS. The principles can obviously be extrapolated into your own solution. The principles used in the WRML solution can be invaluable in transforming a traditional RPC API into a true REST API.

If you are not designing your own general media type to be used across organizations and problem domains, or unless you want to use the imaginary (as far as I can tell) WRML media type, you can probably skip chapter 5. The relevance is limited to a very niche audience. You can usually either create and document your own domain-specific media type, or use a well-known type (e.g. JSON-LD, Siren, HAL, JSON API, Collection+JSON).

Complaints about the inclusion of WRML media type details may be well founded, but the ideas behind this media type should definitely not be dismissed. As far as examples of good APIs, Twilio's API uses a media type that follows some of the principles behind WRML, and Github's uses a bunch as well.
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DCM
2.0 out of 5 stars Some basic structural ideas + some debatable formatting suggestions + an attempt to codify REST before CORS is a standard.
Reviewed in the United States on December 12, 2012
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This was a very quick read which focuses mostly on recommendations for the structure of a RESTful system.

There were some good ideas for people starting their first RESTful system, but this isn't exactly a codified type of system by its very nature. He did put some ideas together for his own standardization, but I didn't really find them to be at the point where I'd change any of my existing code.

The best design appears to be extremely simplistic, whereby you have a root, then collections, then records, then functions, where you then execute your CRUD expressions.

He recommends (as most developers would) that you use the correct CRUD expression for the correct job rather than using parameters. So, you'd have:

[...]

rather than

[...]

And use the type DELETE to say that it's a delete. This is easy if you are using something like curl to effect the action, but in the web-world, we're stuck with security issues that cause this to be impossible.

From an AJAX call, I can't execute a DELETE function. Moreover, unless I'm using something like CORS, I can't do a cross-domain post unless I'm using JSONP, which only accepts GET.

(JSONP & CORS are another book altogether!)

In any case, if you want to make things both RESTful and work in real life, you need to use ALL GET STATEMENTS.

Yes, it's horrible and awful and messy, but it works. In 5 years, we may have CORS to the point where it is functional on all browsers, but right now it isn't.

Another issue I noticed was the insistance on only using paths to execute calls, and including the requested return type in the paramenter. So, to get myrecord I'd do this:

[...]

or

[...]

Well, I happen to do this:
[...]

It is bad form to include the script, but in the real world, you can put together these generic handlers very quickly and they are quite effective. Moreover, they require absolustely no setup or configuration. I can give a 15yr old programmer a generic handler and they can have it up in seconds. All our databases are cloud systems (either Amazon R2 or Azure) so, we pop those handlers on a fat set of machines and we don't worry about losing a tiny bit of efficiency. HOWEVER, if you're going to be doing a lot of work with client-side applications, you really should be using an MCV4 app to serve it. If you are a web-app company, and have a bunch of engineers who live in a .Net web form world, stick with the handlers, that way you can leverage existing personnel.

As far as this book, I was looking for some better ideas with more detail as to the best way to set up these interfaces so they can "start" with JSONP and then be converted over the CORS at a later time. We work in constant flux and REST is moving too fast to formally codify until CORS support covers 99% of the market.
3 people found this helpful
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SrcMaker
4.0 out of 5 stars A good overview of the REST Protocol
Reviewed in the United States on November 8, 2015
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It is not really a book that gives you copy and paste copy examples. If this is what you are looking for to quickly hack up REST web services look elsewhere. I think this book gives the uninitiated a thorough and concise overview into the intentions of the REST protocol. As the creators of REST intended REST itself is very much opened and as development manager I see many web services that claim to be REST really not follow w the REST protocol but instead are simple HTTP based APIs that can be called via REST client implementations such as JAX-RS. Which I guess is fine, all depends how much of a purist you are to follow standards.
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Kyle
2.0 out of 5 stars Focused on WRML too much.
Reviewed in the United States on August 17, 2023
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I don't get it. Why title the book REST API design rule book? It should have been called rules for designing an API using WRML.
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Top reviews from other countries

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Anis Ben Ghanem
5.0 out of 5 stars As described
Reviewed in Germany on April 8, 2024
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As described
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brotherso
2.0 out of 5 stars Trop généraliste
Reviewed in France on January 17, 2023
Verified Purchase
J’ai du me tromper de livre, c’est un livre adapté aux rédacteurs d’api, et qui aborde surtout les règles de rédaction d’une api. La technique pure n’y est pas abordée, il explique surtout les conventions. Pas adapté à un programmeur.
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Albertazzi Angelo
4.0 out of 5 stars Datato ma ancora utile
Reviewed in Italy on July 13, 2022
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Libro datato che però contiene alcune best practices per quanto concerne l'implementazione di Web Api Rest. Visto il costo ne valeva la pena.
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Ricardo
5.0 out of 5 stars Nice
Reviewed in Mexico on June 9, 2018
Verified Purchase
Good content
Useful
Very useful on the understanding and the design of your API
Rest could be use on many technologies
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Sudhir kumar
5.0 out of 5 stars Nice book
Reviewed in India on October 24, 2016
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