Restful Web Services |  | Authors: Leonard Richardson, Sam Ruby
Creator: David Heinemeier Hansson
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Category: Book
List Price: $39.99
Buy Used: $7.49
as of 7/30/2010 03:22 CDT details
You Save: $32.50 (81%)
New (30) Used (19) from $7.49
Seller: aurigadistributionservices
Rating:  46 reviews
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 448
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 7 x 1
ISBN: 0596529260
Dewey Decimal Number: 006.76
EAN: 9780596529260
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
| |
| Features:
| • | ISBN13: 9780596529260 | | • | Condition: New | | • | Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed |
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
| |
| 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.
|
| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 46
 superb book October 27, 2007
F. Lynch
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
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.
The necessary wake-up call for developers who ignore HTTP March 3, 2008
Christian Bauer (Zurich, Switzerland)
9 out of 11 found this review helpful
RESTful web services is one of the (very) few books I read from start to finish without browsing the ToC for "more interesting" chapters than the one I was currently reading. From a writers perspective, this book is executed flawlessly: great organization of content, good segues that keep the flow, fun to read, etc.
The title, however, should be "HTTP used correctly". Of course inventing a new term and world is more fun for everybody involved :) But this is what you will find in this book: An accurate description of the most popular application protocol that runs on top of the most widely-used transport protocol (TCP) on your internets. And enough information to show the SOAP/RPC-over-HTTP guys what they have been abusing for a decade.
At some point before I read this book I was getting extremely annoyed by the "RESTful means your web application has to have nice URLs" statements everybody around me started to make. I then wrongly accused the REST proponents of spreading that kind of misinformation. I basically put them in the same drawer as the SOAP guys, people who just wanted to create new jargon to push some new nonsense methodology, wrapper, or layer; because they profit from more complicated software stacks in one way or another.
So I finally decided to read up on what "RESTful" really means, and after finding more hand-waving and misinformation on wikis and blogs, I decided to read this book. What a surprise, these guys really want to show everyone how to use HTTP properly. Of course that would be great, and this book is the Manifesto this movement really needs.
Prescription for your SOA woes August 31, 2007
Arun Batchu (Eden Prairie, MN USA)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
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.
Seminal Tome for the Web Services Generation May 23, 2007
Thomas Beck (Mechanicsburg, PA)
25 out of 35 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.
A good read for every web programmer February 4, 2009
N. Good
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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).
Showing reviews 1-5 of 46
|
|
|
|
