Book Review | RESTful Web Services : Leonard Richardson, Sam Ruby

RESTful Web Services

Leonard Richardson, Sam Ruby
First Edition: May 2007
ISBN 10: 0-596-52926-0
ISBN 13: 9780596529260
Pages: 446

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About: RESTful Web Services

RESTful Web Services is a classic, and it's an oversight that I haven't got round to reviewing it until now. Put simply, if you are going to read just one book on RESTful Web Services, then this should be the one.

This book is very concise, and it really hits the spot with up-to-date technologies. The style of the Restful Web Services book make it very interesting to read. The concepts are very clearly presented, informative and well written. It even shows you how to implement real world web services in Python, and Ruby; with emphasis on simplicity and elegance. It also discusses the real life examples using Amazon Simple Storage Service and the Atom Publishing Protocol; and it moves on to discuss creating client applications to consume those RESTful Web Services. Finally, it documents resources that are meant to get you started very quickly on your way to the next project.

As with all books, the first chapters introduce the concept of web services by first looking at the semantics of the HTTP protocols and how the request response of a resource is handled on a normal client-server application. Without wasting any time, it quickly demonstrates how to access Flickr™ web services with sample Ruby code. All this chapter does is explain the clients for accessing existing services.

This book was superbly written - especially if you are comfortable using Ruby as your main programming language. I believe this is a major downside to this book. There are no examples written in Java, it there were, this could have made it a smashing all-round success.

Apart from the authors short-sightedness in programming language, I thought RESTful Web Services was very clear, well written, and informative. It includes plenty of nicely presented examples. It's also very readable - which tends to be a rare quality in technical books.

Conclusion

The authors of this book are very knowledgeable on this subject and they really do know their stuff! Having read restful web servicces from cover to cover, I can tell you that a great deal of research and time was spent bringing you this great book on Restful Web Services. What makes this book particularly cool is that all the examples have been presented in many programming languages from Ruby, PHP to Java to Perl and Python.

Biography

Sam Ruby takes a perverse pleasure in integrating disparate things. He is a Vice President of the Apache Software Foundation, chairman of the Jakarta project, member of the XML PMC. He is an officer of ECMA and convener of the TC39 group standardizing the CLI for DotNet. He is a member of the PHP group, and developer on the Apache Soap and Bean Scripting Framework projects. He is currently employed by IBM.

Leonard Richardson has been programming since he was eight years old. Recently, the quality of his code has improved somewhat. He is responsible for libraries in many languages, including Rubyful Soup. A California native, he now works in New York and maintains a web site at http://www.crummy.com/.

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RESTful Web Services : Leonard Richardson, Sam Ruby

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