RESTful Web APIs [Kindle Edition] Author: Leonard Richardson | Language: English | ISBN:
B00F5BS966 | Format: PDF, EPUB
RESTful Web APIs Epub FreeFree download RESTful Web APIs Epub Free from 4shared, mediafire, hotfile, and mirror link
The popularity of REST in recent years has led to tremendous growth in almost-RESTful APIs that don’t include many of the architecture’s benefits. With this practical guide, you’ll learn what it takes to design usable REST APIs that evolve over time. By focusing on solutions that cross a variety of domains, this book shows you how to create powerful and secure applications, using the tools designed for the world’s most successful distributed computing system: the World Wide Web.
You’ll explore the concepts behind REST, learn different strategies for creating hypermedia-based APIs, and then put everything together with a step-by-step guide to designing a RESTful Web API.
- Examine API design strategies, including the collection pattern and pure hypermedia
- Understand how hypermedia ties representations together into a coherent API
- Discover how XMDP and ALPS profile formats can help you meet the Web API "semantic challenge"
- Learn close to two-dozen standardized hypermedia data formats
- Apply best practices for using HTTP in API implementations
- Create Web APIs with the JSON-LD standard and other the Linked Data approaches
- Understand the CoAP protocol for using REST in embedded systems
Books with free ebook downloads available RESTful Web APIs Epub Free
- File Size: 3580 KB
- Print Length: 408 pages
- Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
- Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (September 12, 2013)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00F5BS966
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #60,165 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #25
in Books > Computers & Technology > Web Development & Design > Web Services
- #25
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This is an "ideas" book ... it is both implementation- and platform-agnostic, and there isn't a single line of code anywhere between its covers (except for HTML and JSON data structures.)
As expected from an "ideas" book, the text is peppered with first person thoughts, rhetorical questions, and very strongly held opinions (e.g., "REST beat SOAP" and "JSON beat XML".) If you buy into these, the book will feel natural and even inspired. If you don't, your hackles may get a workout.
Nevertheless, it ultimately does what any good "ideas" book should do - stimulates your thinking.
From a conceptual perspective, this book provides stellar explanations on topics that are must-knows for REST-practitioners. E.g., on the differences between protocol semantics and application semantics; and the relevance of HATEOAS when it comes to the semantic web.
A minor disappointment for me was that the "API" in the title was defined at a higher-level than I'd have liked. At its core, it merely proposes that a new API should not be a custom one-off, but instead should use standards whenever possible. As a result, it focuses on explanations of standards such as those that deal with collections, URI Templates, and hypermedia controls. However, it punts on the more prosaic elements of good REST API design - such as the identification of resources and operations, for a given domain.
This book's contents could also have benefited from better organization. Concepts were spread out geographically, and often needed a lot of paging back and forth to assemble a complete picture.
Despite these minor quibbles, I thoroughly enjoyed the read.
Only having a basic understanding of REST, this book introduced many new concepts and topics to me. For example, I had never heard of the ColIection+JSON standard or JSON-LD. Hypermedia was also a topic that I had barely heard about but was introduced to in this book. I thought it was interesting how the author called out a short process for how to add hypermedia to an existing API as well as if it was worth the effort. These are important questions to ask rather than just suggesting everything needs to be rewritten to be new. Also, standards are mentioned and referred to in this work, which I am guessing is due to the writer's experience as noted on the back cover. Not a negative to include that information, but I was not used to seeing specification notes in many of the traditional tech books I have read recently. The material for me was overall about how to talk about and work with REST concepts correctly. Semantics are addressed as well as when you would probably use this over that, etc. Guidance also seems helpful in sections such as "What Hypermedia Is For". I do appreciate code from the book being out on Github as well as on the book's website. While the examples are in Node.js at this time - it looks like the website is asking for different programming language ports-so examples have the potential to be added/ported over time. In summary, this book is for those looking to really take time and think about their APIs and if they are working with proper (or I guess one could only say proper in the authors' experience) REST techniques. If you need a quick tutorial to get from zero to done fast, this probably is not the material for you. As a side note, I found Appendix A and B as useful and quick references for HTTP codes and headers, but ymmv.
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