RESTful Web Services

PROS:- Provides rigorous (and somewhat academic) description of RESTful-ness and Resource Oriented Architecture (ROA)- Wonderful book if you have complex and large data- This book is great for intended audiences:-- web app/service architect/designers-- who have complex / large data-- who are looking to surface those data via web service and web applications-- who think good organization is very very important (a little bit of OCD would help :)CONs:- Not wonderful book if you do not have complex and large data- It would be boring or irrelevant for:-- a reader who doesn't satisfy any of the above criteriaThe authors are geniuses and have deep knowledge on the whole web space. They also have firm idea on how web-apps and web-services have to be designed to make the entire web better organized, while (almost succeeding in) not being a religious fanatic on the design principles. Hence their presentation is deep and insightful. It opens up your eyes on simple, yet overarching principles of web (HTTP, URI, ...) and teaches you how considering RESTful-ness would improve your web service / app architecture.Like some geniuses, there writing style could be sometimes lengthy and pedantic, not compact. But their writing is still crisp and precise. Academic-degree preciseness. That may be why some are put off by this book but I view it as a small price to pay to learn from their wisdom.I found this book while designing REST API to use for our existing web application. Our web-app is a niche player, but very large and complex system and I was looking to add REST API to make the whole system more "modern". I had some doubt about the book from reading some of negative reviews, but after I completed reading it (on kindle during 8-hour flight), I was sold. The book answered my short term questions, and something much, much bigger and fundamental: RESTful way of looking at web service and applications. It actually convinced me that our web-app could have been designed much better had we known of RESTful / ROA principles and applied them early on. I definitely will remember to re-read this book when our web app/service project comes along.

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 development - the book is extremely good at it! It's worth the buy. The topics are well explained and more so with actual systems like Flickr, Amazon's S3, del.icio.us etc., explaining what is/isn't RESTful about them. It has a ROA vs SOA chapter but you can guess on which side it would be tipped.The most common complaint is that the source code examples are in Ruby. That CAN be a problem, but if you skim the code with the comments and the description that follows after that you'll see the code is more of an illustration. The description is lucid enough for you to know what (type of) methods to call from your favorite library/framework! So effectively you can forget that the code snippets are in Ruby - honestly, the way REST works you won't need to really look at Ruby code to figure out how to implement. Since I am not a Ruby fan I cut off a star :)The missing part however is nothing to say 'When is REST' inappropriate - it's not a silver bullet for building web applications and the like. However, if you are thinking of buying this book and think it's expensive, may I suggest a "used - like new" option. I got mine for about $5 and I must say the book is totally worth it! (From a content point of view too :)

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.