RESTful Web APIs: Services for a Changing World 1st Edition

Fantastic book about hypermedia, a potential future for the web! I think this should be required reading for all API designers and consumers. It might not strike those who play fast and loose with code as very interesting, as its focused on good design rather than getting products out in record time, but I think it's something we should all follow.It's very clearly written and accessible, and doesn't require too much knowledge to dive into. For reference, I started learning programming around 3 years ago through my current college major.Here's the Cliffs Notes version:The problem that the author approaches is that APIs these days are not consistent with one another or even with themselves. This causes several issues:1) APIs are inflexible. Once you release them, it's very difficult to change them. This is ironic, since HTTP and the web is powerful because of its flexibility.2) APIs are not machine-readable. You have to read prose documentation to figure out how they work, and every API is different. At the same time, API documentation is often not up to date or non-existent, and it's unscalable to expect all API developers to maintiain complete documentation for all the APIs that they ever work.3) People create novel, non-standardized APIs for the same general tasks over and over again. There's a staggering amount of repeated work.The hope is that following standards and imposing structure and metadata in your APIs will one day allow API clients to bridge what the author calls "the semantic gap," which amounts to making an API self-document itself by using standardized idioms and good RESTful web practices, a pattern that the author calls "hypermedia."The book lays out the problems, solutions, and process of following good API practices clearly, as well as the kind of work that needs to happen to flesh out hypermedia. In this day and age I think anyone who is writing APIs should read this book first, for the betterment of all—programmers, users, and businesses alike.

I appreciated the code-less look at RESTful APIs. (While it may be code-less, it begs for you to start making HTTP requests and responses all over the wild and examining the details of those in much greater detail.)Because the book presented real URLs for the reader to see examples of API responses, there needs to be a way to indicate that the published URLs don't work or have replacements (or didn't work but have been fixed, etc.) The first place I went to look for that, and I don't think I was atypical, was in O'Reilly's errata for the book. As of December 2013 there are no items that have been moved from the "UNCONFIRMED ERRATA" category to "CONFIRMED ERRATA". Several of those unconfirmed submissions dealt with URL problems. (The "/api/" URL now returns results but the Content-Type is "application/json" : compare this with the response documented on page 18.) My impression as a reader if the errata isn't followed up on is that the author/authors aren't so concerned with the work after publication, and I suspect that's wrong in this case.The profiles and ALPS section (Chapter 8) of the book tickled my interest, but when I looked for the "searchable repository of ALPS documents" at alps.io, it looked like that site hasn't quite firmed up.Despite the annoyances above, I was happy with the content of the book and would recommend it. High points for me include: detail presented in the "Seven-Step Design Procedure" and that it turned me on to OData.

I was very impressed by his book. It provides thorough coverage of RESTful web services from q design perspective, but it's written with developers in mind, and there is plenty of material her that will be of use to developers and designers alike. The author really emphasizes the role of hypermedia in API design and provides a good overview the main points in Roy Fielding's dissertation, and makes a good case for why as developers we should care.

The author lays out the rules for REST and progresses through the reasoning. Masterfully done. I have three books on APIs going, this is the one I turn to.

This is the worst restful book on the market. If you want a rest book, purchase one that has the title of a RESTFUL technology, like asp.net web API, or something java related. This book is so dry you will want to cry, it has no useful programmatic code, and is a regurgitation of the RFC's which is not useful for RESTFUL development. I have marked it with a big black X in my read books section.

As we re-architect existing services to expose RESTful API's, we've found this book provides good reference material. Topics such as resources, representations and the challenging aspects of hypermedia are easy to find and digest. The related diagrams are very helpful for grasping details and complexities. The examples are too simplistic for anything beyond self-training projects (all too typical among books) Finally, we were disappointed that this book contains far too little on identity & federation topics. OAuth coverage is scant; nothing on SAML. Although other books provide good coverage of these topics, books on RESTful API's really need to treat this as one of the core topic areas.

this book help me a lot in order to get fully idea and understand the concept of RESTful in very clear way with enjoyable real life example

Good book if your already familiar with what API's are-