I received this book in three days, which was a fast delivery. I am still working on this book, but I must say I like this book.

Useful not just as a guide to working with web services but also provides a solid overview of what constitutes a good computing platform in general. Restful web services are more important and useful than most people realize but this book provides an immediate update for anyone working in computing.

It took a while before I decided to read this book... Let me say... There's a lot of information that helped me understand various concepts... It's not just about REST... it's also about all the different architectures that make the Web we currently know and use. The Author explains and compares in details, giving lots of code examples in many languages. I personally code with Ruby on Rails, but it's not just about Rails, it's about Django, etc... (framework) and other programming languages than Ruby(Python, Java, etc...).

For the first time, I clearly understand how to create programs that can be read and understood by several MACHINES (computers) via the HTTP protocol...

This book goes as far as giving you tips on how to use your HTTP library to make your program be able to communicate with machines... I love it.

The title should be re-written RESTful web services for Ruby programmers. I didn't realize before buying the book (I bought it online) that almost all of the examples are in Ruby. I don't know Ruby very well, and I really would prefer more examples in Java and Java Script

Packed with all sorts of knowledge about REST, HTTP and AJAX this book will make you very capable at building well designed RESTful web services. Any REST topic imaginable is covered, from obscure ways of handling transactions, to Apache proxies, REST programming in ROR and the limitations of the current browser security model.

While this is all good and useful stuff, it also scatters the books focus, which eventually turns out to be the books major problem. Its topic orientation simply sucks. I would recommend reading the book in this order:

* Core knowledge
- Introduction, Chapter 1 and 3
- Chapter 4, 8, 9
- Optional: chap 10 (comparison to SOAP).

* REST service examples
- Chapter 5, 6 and 7

* REST clients
- Chapter 2 and 11

The rest service examples (chapter 5 - 7) should have been one chapter. The client chapters should also show how to write clients against the example service. The core knowledge scattered throughout chapter 4, 8 and 9 (like the ATOM publishing protocol which is covered multiple places) should be collected and ordered.

So why the four starts ?. I have to admit that my annoyance with the books topical layout is trumped the authors knowledge and their ability to pack a surprising number of usable facts into this book. So if you do not loose your way in their topical jungle then you will eventually come through as a REST maven.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

This book doesn't give a lot of technical details, but is a great introduction to resource oriented web service design and development.

good overall description and discussion around the topic. always handy when someone takes effort to put it all in one place.

this book is very very very interesting for any professional IT (IT architect like me) which work in the Web technologies. it is well written and is very well argumented.

it presents us a new alternative to actual SOAP technologies which permit us to the SOA enablement. Now xOA has two architectural style : SOA (with SOAP) and ROA (with REST design principles)

this book has reveal me the true power of HTTP (and the fact that it is currently underused) and of RESTful Web Services.

I think that now i have a real alternative in my IT (RPC style) solutions.

Try and learn it quickly to be innovative in your IT solution design.

Definetively, a must have in your IT library

Yves

Excellent coverage of REST and of fundamental ROA (and even SOA) concepts. Comprehensive examples and case studies of real world major sites. Extremely readable. The book's style practices what REST preaches: simplicity is genius.

Good value. Excellent reference and tutorial on REST. The links to helpful URLs in the back are worthwhile by themselves. Most of the examples are in the Ruby programming language and the Ruby on Rails web application framework, but Python and Java (Restlet) are also used for examples.

With all the buzz around SOA, most of us have not looked at alternatives to SOAP Web Services. Most of my background and training has focused on SOAP-based Web Services and hadn't spend much time looking at alternatives such as REST-based Web Services RESTful Web Services. In order to get up to speed quickly on RESTful Web Services I bought this book through Amazon.ca.

While a lot of the emphasis of this book is around the "Programmable Web", it does provide a great overview of REST Web Services.

I recommend this book if you want to get up to speed quickly on RESTful Web Services.

Gary E. Smith
THE SOA NETWORK
www.soanetwork.net

This book very clearly sets out the case for a Resource-Oriented-Architecture. Its simiple, scalable, document oriented, with much of its value coming from the fact that operations are idempotent.
Understanding REST requires quite a shift in your thinking especially if your coming from an MOM/RPC/ORB background (as I was). This book is a superb aid in evolving your thinking on distributed computing. If you think that REST is just for simple integrations or serving up web content, read this book and you will rethink You can leverage ROA/REST to solve very real distributed computing challenges with great simplicity & elegance.
This is a must read for anyone that is serious about distributed computing.

This book is a nice work on RESTful web-services, but I found the examples to be less than useful. The majority of the examples hide the true details of the creation and handling of RESTful web-services in calls to Ruby libraries. These examples give the reader no real understanding of what's actually happening under the covers and thus no platform from which to attempt to implement RESTful web-services in other languages.

It's also troubling that the authors have found it necessary to redefine already well defined industry terms and definitions in order to bolster their own arguments for REST. For instance the authors, throughout the book, repeatedly refer to all SOAP exchanges as being RPC like, which is certainly not the case. The authors make no attempt to compare and contrast real message-oriented or document-literal web-services against RESTful web-services. Chapter 10 includes one single sentence on "new WSDL features" like document/literal, which the authors admit to not covering, as encouraging the creation of RPC style web-services. At best this is simple ignorance and at worst is willful deception.

I'd recommend this book as a good resource on the idea of what it means for a web-service to be truly RESTful, but I would also advise the reader to approach this work from a critical thinking standpoint. It's obvious from reading this work that the author's have an agenda and that they are willing to alter industry standard terms and definitions in order to promote their work.

Cheers

For those of us floundering in the complete mess of heavyweight web service standards driven by the large industry vendors, it comes as a surprise that the web already has all the features you need to build enterprise level distributed systems.

This book is well written and will become one of the 'must haves' on any developer's bookshelf.

A book well written and self-explanatory about how to write wonderful web-services without getting crazy with WSDL :)

For those of us who have borne the agony of delivering and maintaining "big" web services, REST architectures as theorized by Roy Fielding came as a whiff of welcome,fresh air. But, like in any fresh pastures, the oxygenating promise of simplicity pulled us in different directions leading to arguments about the degrees of RESTfulness and the fundamental principles of REST. From Amazon to deli.cio.us to flickr, RESTful API's flourish, but when compared, differ. Which raises the question: if there was a 'pure' REST architecture, what would it look like? How would you build it?
This book answers those questions more completely than any other resource out there. It has been one of the most valuable books I have held with me for it has shown me in all its glorious theory, practice and examples, how I may generate complex service-oriented behavior using simple rules. Once immersed, 400 pages will fly by. The rules were always out there, what this book does is simply to explain them to the rest of us, who have not 'got it' yet and how to play by those rules. Read the book. Chew on it. When you understand the vision and the road-map it lays out to achieve the vision, as you begin to see how you may scale those seemingly-unsurmountable web-service hurdles, you will be as glad as I am now, to have invested in this wonderful book.

Ok, the concept behind the book is valid: let's have computers use the web the way it was intended to be used, and if everybody sticks to a small set of reasonable design rules, we'd all be better off. But why does it take 400 pages for the authors to drive that point home (over and over again)? 70% of the content seems "filler" material, which has been put in just to turn this into a book. True, there are code examples that may be helpful to some beginner programmers, but I'm still left feeling that this could have been a well-written, 3-chapter book about 100 pages long.

I'm still glad I read it but found the blabbing rather frustrating. My 2c.

Collections strong in web services and web development will find Leonard Richardson & Sam Ruby's RESTFUL WEB SERVICES an important guide to connecting web functions with everyday technologies everyone uses. REST is an architectural style that drives the web, and RESTFUL WEB SERVICES introduces ROA and the roles that govern design of RESTFUL web services. Advanced computer libraries catering to programmers need this expose which surveys functions and real-world applications, including common problems and solutions.

1) The editors were apparently on vacation. There are numerous errors including several typographical errors that a simple spell-check would have caught (words like "ang" and "extrenal") and a number of ungrammatical sentences.
2) The authors frequently make best practices statements without actually supporting them with evidence or otherwise explaining what makes them best practices.
3) There's really only about 100 pages of content. The other three quarters of the book is repetition. For example, chapters 4 and 8 seem to be the same. There is even a specific example regarding content language that is presented in chapter 4 and not referred to but simply repeated in chapter 8.

This book could be obsoleted by a brief 3 part tutorial perhaps combined with a half-hour slide show.

This book is the definitive reference on REST and its principles. It explains in great detail the foundations of well designed web services, and provides excellent advice on how to model them, mixing a lot of theory and code (most of it written in Ruby). Essential reading for anyone working with the web.

I've been programming the web for more than 10 years and this book does an amazing job of bringing all of us back to basics. So many whiz bang technologies have been built on *top* of the web, all the while losing sight of what makes the HTTP protocol brilliantly successful.

Einstein once said: "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." This epitomizes the goals of HTTP and RESTful web service design. It's about time we had a book that cut through the muck of SOAP and SOA and showed us that all we needed was right here from the beginning.

There's a lot of material in this book - close to 400 dense pages of highly technical information. This and the ton of examples can't help but impress upon you that the authors are smart. Very smart.
The problem I have with this book is that maybe there's too much information. REST is supposed to simplify things, right? Up until this point I've read about REST in a couple of Rails book. I understand it (I think) and believe it's the wave of the future, especially after spending hours slogging through 800+ page books on JEE Web Services, WS-Death-*s (good call DHH!) and SOAs. While this book clocks in with less pages, it's still a tough read at times. And sometimes it was easy to lose sight of the forest while meandering through the numerous and sometimes-scattered trees.
Maybe that's just how tech books are; I don't know. I do know that most people are pressed for time and don't live and breath this stuff - which could explain the popularity of the "For Dummies" and "Head First" series.
Come to think of it, that's what I'd like to see: a "Head First RESTful Web Services" book. I think that would actually *help more people* to understand, and thus use, this technology.

RESTful web services are used so much today but rarely talked about (compared to SOAP, Corba, etc).

This book has great examples of truly RESTful applications including examples for Amazon's S3 service.

A lot of examples include code for many languages (Python, Ruby, PHP, etc). However, the author strongly favors Ruby which is fine. Ruby/Python are so easy to learn that even if you are a PHP programmer the book would be useful.

cbmeeks

'RESTful Web Services' by Leonard Richardson is an absolute MUST BUY for all web 2.0 developers and/or web service developers out there in the world. With all the time that has passed since the internet was born to the masses in the early 90s, the web has become a bloated mess. While there have been improvements made, the basic nature of the net which is what makes it so unique and so powerful has become too confusing and that is hat makes this book so powerful. Stripping the confusion away, this book simplifies the web and in particular web services in general, tightening things up and showing how by making things simple makes things happy.

Building topics up bit by bit and taking things in baby steps, this book is an absolute gem that all web services developers need to go out and read TO-DAY. If you want to become a better web services and internet developer, you owe it to yourself to read this great piece of work.

***** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Great to see a book that tries to show how to provide simple programmatic access to web applications. It's a must read if you have come to believe that programmatic access == SOAP. It's a bit unfortunate that the book jumps on the buzzword wagon (and the book could have done with a bit less Ajax & Ruby), but I guess that's what sells... Somehow I felt the examples and the organization of the book didn't make the argument quite as convincing as it could have been, but that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of good material in the book, even for someone who has been following the debate for a while!

Absolutely excellent book that covers not only the how, but the why of REST , as it is currently understood.

Until now, there has not been a definitive resource that a developer can turn to when looking for guidance on RESTful service design. REST resources have consisted of mailing lists, blogs, and (sometimes dense) articles. While there is plenty of good (and some not so good) information available, it is difficult at times to get a clear and concise view of the REST landscape, a view which is provided by Richardson and Ruby here.

This book also gives an overview of what the authors call "Big Web Services" (SOAP, WSDL, and their cousins) and lays out a persuasive argument for choosing a RESTful architecture over an RPC-based, web-breaking one.

If you are at all interested in web development or the future of software that leverages the web, do yourself a favor and pick up this book.

This book is great! The author gives a great background on REST and illustrates several examples of RESTful web services. Real-world examples are heavily based on Amazon Web Services (S3), flickr and implementing RESTful web services using the Ruby On Rails framework.

I just finished the book, reading it cover-to-cover within 36 hours. It's excellent - concise, clear, comprehensive, with a great mix of practical information and theory, and an impressively even depth. I've been developing RESTful APIs for over 18 months, and I see the release of this book as a major milestone in the raucous development of RESTful service design.

Every IT generation has its seminal tome that transcends time and connects the dots in a way that no book had before it. For the object oriented generation in the 1980s, it was the Gang of Four (GoF) book. For the application architecture generation in the 1990s, it was Fowler's book on patterns (PoEAA). "RESTful Web Services" will be, in my opinion, that book for the 2000s Web services generation.

There is something absolutely special about this book that readers of GoF or PoEAA will immediately recognize and appreciate. The book covers a breadth of technologies and ideas yet it helps the reader see how they all connect. It uses short code samples (in Ruby, the choice of this generation) to illustrate rather than obfuscate the ideas. Most importantly, it makes the complex comprehensible and delivers epiphany-like experiences throughout the book.

There are too many highlights in this book to enumerate in this review. However, some of the coverage that I appreciated most included:

* The chapters on resource-oriented design, since there was practically no written information available on this topic prior to this book
* The chapter on resource-oriented best practices
* An overview of the service building blocks, including the different representational formats and WADL, which I wasn't aware of
* The chapter comparing and contrasting RESTful services with the "Big" (e.g. SOAP) service overhead that is common in most enterprise environments

I would have liked to see this book touch on simple POX versus true REST and handle the resource-oriented security concerns in a bit more detail but you can only ask so much of any one book. I'm fairly confident that "RESTful Web Services", like the seminal tomes that have gone before it, will become assumed reading for IT professionals and will be found on bookshelves in cubes across the world.