RESTful Web Services | 
 enlarge | Authors: Leonard Richardson, Sam Ruby
Creator: David Heinemeier Hansson
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Category: Book
List Price: $39.99
Buy New: $22.37
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Rating:  31 reviews
Sales Rank: 10936
Format: Illustrated
Media: Paperback
Pages: 446
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.9 x 1.1
ISBN: 0596529260
Dewey Decimal Number: 006.76
EAN: 9780596529260
Publication Date: May 8, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: All orders ship same business day via standard shipping (USPS Media Mail) if received by 1 PM CST.
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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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 26 more reviews...
 Essential Book For All Web 2.0 Developers July 3, 2007
Daniel McKinnon (Tewksbury, MA USA)
9 out of 20 found this review helpful
'RESTful Web Services' by Leonard Richardson is an absolute MUST BUY for all web 2.0 developers and/or web service developers out there in the world. With all the time that has passed since the internet was born to the masses in the early 90s, the web has become a bloated mess. While there have been improvements made, the basic nature of the net which is what makes it so unique and so powerful has become too confusing and that is hat makes this book so powerful. Stripping the confusion away, this book simplifies the web and in particular web services in general, tightening things up and showing how by making things simple makes things happy.
Building topics up bit by bit and taking things in baby steps, this book is an absolute gem that all web services developers need to go out and read TO-DAY. If you want to become a better web services and internet developer, you owe it to yourself to read this great piece of work.
***** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Seminal Tome for the Web Services Generation May 23, 2007
Thomas Beck (Mechanicsburg, PA)
24 out of 34 found this review helpful
Every IT generation has its seminal tome that transcends time and connects the dots in a way that no book had before it. For the object oriented generation in the 1980s, it was the Gang of Four (GoF) book. For the application architecture generation in the 1990s, it was Fowler's book on patterns (PoEAA). "RESTful Web Services" will be, in my opinion, that book for the 2000s Web services generation.
There is something absolutely special about this book that readers of GoF or PoEAA will immediately recognize and appreciate. The book covers a breadth of technologies and ideas yet it helps the reader see how they all connect. It uses short code samples (in Ruby, the choice of this generation) to illustrate rather than obfuscate the ideas. Most importantly, it makes the complex comprehensible and delivers epiphany-like experiences throughout the book.
There are too many highlights in this book to enumerate in this review. However, some of the coverage that I appreciated most included:
* The chapters on resource-oriented design, since there was practically no written information available on this topic prior to this book
* The chapter on resource-oriented best practices
* An overview of the service building blocks, including the different representational formats and WADL, which I wasn't aware of
* The chapter comparing and contrasting RESTful services with the "Big" (e.g. SOAP) service overhead that is common in most enterprise environments
I would have liked to see this book touch on simple POX versus true REST and handle the resource-oriented security concerns in a bit more detail but you can only ask so much of any one book. I'm fairly confident that "RESTful Web Services", like the seminal tomes that have gone before it, will become assumed reading for IT professionals and will be found on bookshelves in cubes across the world.
Great resource June 2, 2007
W. A. Strand (Seattle)
7 out of 10 found this review helpful
This book is great! The author gives a great background on REST and illustrates several examples of RESTful web services. Real-world examples are heavily based on Amazon Web Services (S3), flickr and implementing RESTful web services using the Ruby On Rails framework.
Must Read for Any Developer June 17, 2007
D. R. Sidlinger (Nashville, TN USA)
7 out of 10 found this review helpful
Absolutely excellent book that covers not only the how, but the why of REST , as it is currently understood.
Until now, there has not been a definitive resource that a developer can turn to when looking for guidance on RESTful service design. REST resources have consisted of mailing lists, blogs, and (sometimes dense) articles. While there is plenty of good (and some not so good) information available, it is difficult at times to get a clear and concise view of the REST landscape, a view which is provided by Richardson and Ruby here.
This book also gives an overview of what the authors call "Big Web Services" (SOAP, WSDL, and their cousins) and lays out a persuasive argument for choosing a RESTful architecture over an RPC-based, web-breaking one.
If you are at all interested in web development or the future of software that leverages the web, do yourself a favor and pick up this book.
Excellent, Definitive, Highly Useful, a Milestone May 25, 2007
Avi Flax
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
I just finished the book, reading it cover-to-cover within 36 hours. It's excellent - concise, clear, comprehensive, with a great mix of practical information and theory, and an impressively even depth. I've been developing RESTful APIs for over 18 months, and I see the release of this book as a major milestone in the raucous development of RESTful service design.
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