"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 Rating:
Summary: Must-read for web 2.0 developers
Comment: This book is an outstanding exposition of what makes a web service RESTful, as opposed to RPC-based, why RESTful is important, and how achieve RESTful-ness. The exposition is clear and the examples are helpful and to the point. Best of all, it's a gripping read, and how often can you say that about a book on software methodology and architecture?

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Essential guide for building REST Web Services
Comment: This book fills a gap that has existed for a long time. It clearly explains the advantages of RESTful architecture, It cuts through the SOAP vs. REST nonsense and helps you to understand some of the most important and poorly understood concepts of the web's architecture.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Great (but repetitive) Guide
Comment: Sure... it's got its issues: very repetitive, some glitches here & there... But overall, it's the best (if not the DEFINITIVE) guide to RESTful Web Services.

If you've used SOAP and/or other Web Services-related technologies/schemas/etc. etc. etc. you should have no problem following this. For beginners, however, it is definitely not the place to start. You will need to read-up a bit more on Web Services in general and some of the options and practices out there.

The repetition in the book isn't so bad. It drives home a lot of good points and covers quite a bit of in-depth information (sometimes too much, but it has come in handy when talking with other professionals/engineers).

To work with Web Services and not have at least glanced over this book would be a huge mistake. Just be careful: it may take you a while to get through. It does get a little boring from time to time.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Info, Badddd Editor
Comment: The book is full of general knowledge that anyone in Web Development should know, but the editors did a horrible job. Nice book guyz but I would definitely s-can the intern who did the error checking.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: The necessary wake-up call for developers who ignore HTTP
Comment: 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.

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