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Some bits of code seemed to miss some context for me.To finish on a better note, i found chapter 9, 10 and 11 really interesting. Lots of useful information about REST architecture, but the book is much too long and not well structured in my opinion.Essentially, I would have found better to have definitions of what REST is at the beginning. and the links of AJAX with RESTfulness. These are nice overviews of :- often used technologies in web services (atom, gdata, Xhtml+ microformats)- SOAP related technologies (very nice summary) and their RESTful counterpart- AJAX and the tricks that made it possible (XMLHttpRequest, request proxying, java script on demand,.). I did find that chapter 5 '"The resource oriented architecture" and 8 "REST and ROA best practices" should have been merged (too much common topics) and finally, that the examples spanning over one hundred page are really too long (was it necessary to go into such details over three chapters : 5, 6, 7. ).Furthermore, I did find that the book assumes too much knowledge about Ruby On Rails.
(At least I found it a little distracting).In short, what I found out, is that to learn about REST, you don't have to read an entire book. What if the reader so neutral, as in my case, and he sincerely want to objectively learn the technology, perhaps I can judge for myself at the end.As I said, I just wanted to learn about REST, and I felt it was a complete wast of my time that I spend trying to read the first few chapters of the book.One more minor thing but still annoying, is the fact they chose Ruby vs. any of the main stream languages for the web. I have picked this book because in my course to broaden my knowledge about Web Services, I wanted to learn about REST. Just an article or two over the Internet would do.DON'T wast your TIME or MONEY.Thanks I was surprised that the authors spend a lot of time talking about why the WS-* web services are getting it wrong and how complicated they are and how REST based are good. After all, if Amazon and eBay among others are already using it, I thought it should be important enough to get some traction in the distributed computing world.I started to read the book with an open heart and mind to learn about REST. They started a fight or an argument as if the reader is an opponent on the other side of the isle or as if they trying to recruit the reader to their camp.
which are important prior to practical adoption were addressed This is an easy read and within hours I suppose I had a good overview of RESTful webservices - in comparison to the more prevalent RPC style SOAP services.This is not a hands on coding book for JAVA or.NET developers - only concepts and architectural principles.Several limitations of RESTful services - e.g. lack of security etc.
This book does cover some good aspects of restlet but don't get into any security aspects also it is little outdates at this point because it does not cover any of the JAX-RS implementations(Jersey or RestEasy). It is a good buy for developers who have an experience playing around with ruby code because most of the code snippets in the book is coded in ruby. It does have java snippets but very few.
The book can be thought of as a full featured, professional, step by step tutorial to REST world: starting from basic "programmable web" concepts to in-depth discussion of Roy Fielding's Representational State Transfer (REST) ideas and finally Resource Oriented Architecture (ROA). RESTful Web Services is one of the best books I have recently read. If you plan to build web services please read this book first. The book covers some theory but (what was the most important for me) it mainly focus on practical aspects of REST by presenting a multiple of practical advices, recipes (and gotchas) to help one design and build scalable web services. Before starting reading I have attended a few presentations on REST and I naively thought I became quite familiar with it. Now I can see how ignorant I was about it.This book really helped me to deeply understand what REST is all about and why it is becoming so popular.
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