The book tries to establish a set of rules for REST interfaces - I'm OK with that, it's what its title says. When you define rules, you take an opinion, that's fine. And most of what is defined as a rule is something I'd support as a good practice. A possible benefit of this rule book would be to provide some compact, memorizable, and clear guidance on good practices.

But then there's this obsession about WRML.

WRML is a proposed way of defining the content types and sche More...

This is a better book than my pure star rating would seem to indicate. It's not that I didn't like the book - it was OK.

However, as a highly opinionated book, I wonder how widely accepted the ideas being laid down as rules actually are. I think there is much here that people can agree is best practice when designing a RESTful API. However, I'm left with the feeling that much of the rest of it is a one-man campaign towards standards that may never be adopted at large.

So, More...

Two huge problems with this book. It's short and very repetitive so the information content is about a couple of blog posts. The 'rules' are highly subjective, and much of the book is pushing the author's WRML 'standard' which I've never seen in the wild. The only real positive is that it's a comprehensive survey of the issues you need to think about when designing a REST API: just don't take the rules as gospel and research best practice from major APIs so you understand the context.

Good, but very short book.