RESTful Web Services Cookbook
by Subbu Allamaraju, Subrahmanyam Allamaraju · first published 2010
15mentions
10recommended by
12HN commenters
2010–2025first – last mentioned
83% recommend17% neutral
Why HN recommends it
A practical, pattern-based guide to designing HTTP APIs, moving progressively through HTTP features. It covers bulk operations, snapshots, and when REST is or is not a good fit.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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Try the REST cookbook: http://www.amazon.com/RESTful-Web-Services-Cookbook-Scalabil...
on “Changing times for web developers” ↗…semi-colon and comma characters in URLs when pointing at an endpoint that generates a response that would typically be provided by a query string, e.g.: http://site.com/generate;lang=en,size=32,weight=78 RESTful Web Services Cookbook[1] gave me the idea (a fantastic book) and what I like about it, is that interstitial proxy software seems to molest the URL less where as some refuse to pass through query string params for some reason…
on “General principles for good URI design for RESTful and HTTP applications” ↗…RESTful API with JS front end, please excuse me pimping my own project: http://phreeze.com/ (the REST server is in PHP) Here's a language-neutral book that goes into RESTful services: http://www.amazon.com/RESTful-Web-Services-Cookbook-Scalabil...
on “Great books for learning modern web application architectures?” ↗I'd recommend this book http://www.amazon.com/RESTful-Web-Services-Cookbook-Scalabil... It's amazing, really. It's not just a recipies list, it explains a lot of very important REST cases, and also when to use or not to use REST.
on “When REST isn't Good Enough” ↗…best practices. Here are two of my favorite REST resources (pun intended). Richardson Maturity Model: steps toward the glory of REST http://martinfowler.com/articles/richardsonMaturityModel.htm... RESTful Web Services Cookbook: Solutions for Improving Scalability and Simplicity http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596801688 And I am looking forward to widespread adoption of the REST problem standard posted here a few weeks ago.…
on “Some REST best practices” ↗Not all business/domain logic is document-oriented. You can map any api to “documents” but result will be horrible usually. There is an excellent book — “RESTful Web Services Cookbook” by Subbu Allamaraju, it covers all aspects of practical REST API and trains very useful sense of REST applicability.
on “RESTful considered harmful” ↗…you get update actions for free in your controller. So you could do: curl -X PUT -d "<params>" http://myapp.com/project/1234 See section 11.6 (How to take snapshots of resources) in the book "RESTFul web services cookbook" for a discussion of this...
on “REST question” ↗You might be interested in "RESTful Web Services Cookbook", it covers some of the topics you discuss and is a very pragmatic book.
on “Nobody Understands REST or HTTP” ↗…statuses > REST is stateless HTTP is a protocol. A protocol by definition allows certain constructs and prohibits others. There are books available for modeling real-world problems with REST, such as RESTful web services cookbook. I'd suggest going through them, before declaring REST is impractical. >I'm not sure if I can do it pragmatically in HTTP without getting yelled at You can certainly use HTTP as you like it, just…
on “Nobody Understands REST or HTTP” ↗When I read the title of the post, I wrongly assumed it linked to the "RESTful Web Services Cookbook", which is another O'Reilly classic on this topic. The advice I've heard is to read one or the other, depending on which prose style you prefer. It's nice to see a CC-licensed effort to create a similar…
on “The Restful CookBook” ↗…advantages (e.g. lots of more granular resources can be retrieved over a single connection). 2. There are patterns for that though, often best approach is to represent that transaction as a resource. Restful Web Services Cookbook covers approaches for these sorts of bulk operations. 3. Not sure that's an argument against going resource oriented, if you don't find the debate interesting just ignore it.
on “Web Development with React, Falcor, and ES6” ↗I recommend this physical book: 'RESTful Web Services Cookbook'. It walks you though the rationale behind HTTP APIs and progressively using more and more of HTTP's features to build a sophisticated but elegant API. [1] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596801694.do
on “Ask HN: What are good reads for designing APIs?” ↗Yes, it's very instructive. It's written in the typical terse cookbook style. Read the Amazon reviews, they nail it pretty well. http://www.amazon.com/RESTful-Web-Services-Cookbook-Scalabil... I preferred it to RESTful Web Services, which is rather long winded.
on “Tell HN: Save 60% on all O'Reilly E-books” ↗The page linked to in the second point mentions "Restful Web Services Cookbook", it's a while since I've read it but my memory is as the the author says it covers solutions for each of the three issues you are raising.
on “Web Development with React, Falcor, and ES6” ↗…was working on my first HTTP-based API 13 years ago, based on many comments about true REST, I decided to first study what REST should really be. I've read Fielding's paper cover to cover, I've read RESTful Web Services Cookbook from O'Reilly and then proceeded to workaround Django idioms to provide REST API. This was a bit cargo cult thinking from my end, I didn't truly understand how REST would benefit my service. I took me…
on “Most RESTful APIs aren't really RESTful” ↗