REST in Practice: Hypermedia and Systems Architecture

By Jim Webber, Savas Parastatidis, Ian Robinson

ISBN: 978-0596805821

I read this book because I wanted to learn about REST for a project I’m doing. This book taught me about REST. In fact it did it in the first five chapters. That’s less than half the book and it could have been quicker! There is a lot of, to my mind, unnecessary detail that could have been postponed to later chapters or even an appendix. I just wanted to get to the code and to the “how”, I’m not overly interested in the “why” in this much depth. Furthermore I found the vast majority of the diagrams incomprehensible and totally unhelpful.

However, the book did answer my questions about REST and even using the same REST framework I’d chosen for my project. Unlike a lot of other books, web service clients were not neglected. In fact they were there in as much detail as the server side components with real code! The format of the book is also great for skipping to the good parts and the parts with code.

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