RESTful API Design
When it comes to designing web APIs, no other style is more respected than REST. Here you’ll get 15 helpful REST API books with a variety of experience levels.
Each book in this list is valuable for a specific purpose, either getting you started or advancing your existing knowledge. But they’re all fantastic choices and they all cover API development in great detail.
1.RESTful API Design (API-University Series)
Author: Matthias Biehl
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform; 1 edition (August 29, 2016)
Looking for Best Practices for RESTful APIs?
This book is for you! Why? Because this book is packed with practical experience on what works best for RESTful API Design.
You want to design APIs like a Pro?
Use API description languages to both design APIs and develop APIs efficiently. The book introduces the two most common API description languages RAML, OpenAPI, and Swagger.
Your company cares about its customers?
Learn API product management with a customer-centric design and development approach for APIs. Learn how to manage APIs as a product and how to follow an API-first approach. Build APIs your customers love!
2.RESTful Java Web Services: A pragmatic guide to designing and building RESTful APIs using Java, 3rd Edition
Author: Bogunuva Mohanram Balachandar
Publisher: Packt Publishing; 3rd Revised edition edition (November 17, 2017)
Representational State Transfer (REST) is a simple yet powerful software architecture style to create lightweight and scalable web services. The RESTful web services use HTTP as the transport protocol and can use any message formats, including XML, JSON(widely used), CSV, and many more, which makes it easily inter-operable across different languages and platforms.
This successful book is currently in its 3rd edition and has been used by thousands of developers. It serves as an excellent guide for developing RESTful web services in Java.
This book attempts to familiarize the reader with the concepts of REST. It is a pragmatic guide for designing and developing web services using Java APIs for real-life use cases following best practices and for learning to secure REST APIs using OAuth and JWT. Finally, you will learn the role of RESTful web services for future technological advances, be it cloud, IoT or social media.
By the end of this book, you will be able to efficiently build robust, scalable, and secure RESTful web services using Java APIs.
3.Restful Java with Jax-Rs 2.0
Author: Bill Burke
Publisher: O'Reilly Media; Second edition (December 2, 2013)
Learn how to design and develop distributed web services in Java, using RESTful architectural principles and the JAX-RS 2.0 specification in Java EE 7. By focusing on implementation rather than theory, this hands-on reference demonstrates how easy it is to get started with services based on the REST architecture.
With the book’s technical guide, you’ll learn how REST and JAX-RS work and when to use them. The RESTEasy workbook that follows provides step-by-step instructions for installing, configuring, and running several working JAX-RS examples, using the JBoss RESTEasy implementation of JAX-RS 2.0.
4.RESTful Java Web Services - Second Edition
Author: Purushothaman Jobinesh
Publisher: Packt Publishing; 2 edition (September 2015)
REST (REpresentational State Transfer) is a simple yet powerful software architecture style to create scalable web services and allow them to be simple, lightweight, and fast. The REST API uses HTTP and JSON, so that it can be used with many programming languages such as Ruby, Java, Python, and Scala. Its use in Java seems to be the most popular though, because of the API's reusability.
This book is a guide to developing RESTful web services in Java using the popular RESTful framework APIs available today. You will begin with gaining an in-depth knowledge of the RESTful software architectural style and its relevance in modern applications. Further, you will understand the APIs to parse, generate, transform, and query JSON effectively. Then, you will see how to build a simple RESTful service using the popular JAX-RS 2.0 API along with some real-world examples. This book will introduce you to the Jersey framework API, which is used to simplify your web services.
You will also see how to secure your services with various authentication mechanisms. You will get to grips with various solutions to describe, produce, consume, and visualize RESTful web services. Finally, you will see how to design your web services to equip them for the future technological advances, be it Cloud or mobile computing.
By the end of this book, you will be able to efficiently build robust, scalable, and secure RESTful web services, making use of the JAX-RS and Jersey framework extensions.
5.Pro RESTful APIs: Design, Build and Integrate with REST, JSON, XML and JAX-RS
Author: Sanjay Patni
Publisher: Apress; 1st ed. edition (March 22, 2017)
Discover the RESTful technologies, including REST, JSON, XML, JAX-RS web services, SOAP and more, for building today's microservices, big data applications, and web service applications. This book is based on a course the Oracle-based author is teaching for UC Santa Cruz Silicon Valley which covers architecture, design best practices and coding labs.
Pro RESTful APIs: Design gives you all the fundamentals from the top down: from the top (architecture) through the middle (design) to the bottom (coding). This book is a must have for any microservices or web services developer building applications and services.
6.Restful Web Apis
Author: Leonard Richardson (Author), Mike Amundsen (Contributor), Sam Ruby (Contributor)
Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (September 30, 2013)
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.
7.REST API Design Rulebook
Author: Mark Masse
Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (October 31, 2011)
In today’s market, where rival web services compete for attention, a well-designed REST API is a must-have feature. This concise book presents a set of API design rules, drawn primarily from best practices that stick close to the Web’s REST architectural style. Along with rules for URI design and HTTP use, you’ll learn guidelines for media types and representational forms.
REST APIs are ubiquitous, but few of them follow a consistent design methodology. Using these simple rules, you will design web service APIs that adhere to recognized web standards. To assist you, author Mark Massé introduces the Web Resource Modeling Language (WRML), a conceptual framework he created for the design and implementation of REST APIs.
8.RESTful Web Services
Author: Leonard Richardson (Author), Sam Ruby (Author), David Heinemeier Hansson (Foreword)
Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (May 18, 2007)
"Every developer working with the Web needs to read this book."-- David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the Rails framework
"RESTful Web Services finally provides a practical roadmap for constructing services that embrace the Web, instead of trying to route around it."-- Adam Trachtenberg, PHP author and EBay Web Services Evangelist
You've built web sites that can be used by humans. But can you also build web sites that are usable by machines? That's where the future lies, and that's what RESTful Web Services shows you how to do. The World Wide Web is the most popular distributed application in history, and Web services and mashups have turned it into a powerful distributed computing platform. But today's web service technologies have lost sight of the simplicity that made the Web successful. They don't work like the Web, and they're missing out on its advantages.
9.RESTful Web API Design with Node.js 10: Learn to create robust RESTful web services with Node.js, MongoDB, and Express.js, 3rd Edition
Author: Valentin Bojinov
Publisher: Packt Publishing; 3rd Revised edition edition (April 30, 2018)
When building RESTful services, it is really important to choose the right framework. Node.js, with its asynchronous, event-driven architecture, is exactly the right choice for building RESTful APIs.
This third edition of RESTful Web API Design with Node.js 10 will teach you to create scalable and rich RESTful applications based on the Node.js platform. You will be introduced to the latest NPM package handler and understand how to use it to customize your RESTful development process. You will begin by understanding the key principle that makes an HTTP application a RESTful-enabled application. After writing a simple HTTP request handler, you will create and test Node.js modules using automated tests and mock objects; explore using the NoSQL database, MongoDB, to store data; and get to grips with using self-descriptive URLs. You'll learn to set accurate HTTP status codes along with understanding how to keep your applications backward-compatible. Also, while implementing a full-fledged RESTful service, you will use Swagger to document the API and implement automation tests for a REST-enabled endpoint with Mocha. Lastly, you will explore some authentication techniques to secure your application.
10.Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems
Author: Sam Newman
Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (February 20, 2015)
Distributed systems have become more fine-grained in the past 10 years, shifting from code-heavy monolithic applications to smaller, self-contained microservices. But developing these systems brings its own set of headaches. With lots of examples and practical advice, this book takes a holistic view of the topics that system architects and administrators must consider when building, managing, and evolving microservice architectures.
Microservice technologies are moving quickly. Author Sam Newman provides you with a firm grounding in the concepts while diving into current solutions for modeling, integrating, testing, deploying, and monitoring your own autonomous services. You’ll follow a fictional company throughout the book to learn how building a microservice architecture affects a single domain.
11.The Design of Web APIs
Author: Arnaud Lauret
Publisher: Manning Publications; 1st edition (November 6, 2019)
Web APIs are everywhere, giving developers an efficient way to interact with applications, services, and data. Well-designed APIs are a joy to use; poorly-designed APIs are cumbersome, confusing, and frustrating.
The Design of Web APIs is a practical, example packed guide to crafting extraordinary web APIs. Author Arnaud Lauret demonstrates fantastic design principles and techniques you can apply to both public and private web APIs.
Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications.
12.Restful Web Services Cookbook: Solutions For Improving Scalability And Simplicity
Author: Subbu Allamaraju
Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (March 14, 2010)
While the REST design philosophy has captured the imagination of web and enterprise developers alike, using this approach to develop real web services is no picnic. This cookbook includes more than 100 recipes to help you take advantage of REST, HTTP, and the infrastructure of the Web. You'll learn ways to design RESTful web services for client and server applications that meet performance, scalability, reliability, and security goals, no matter what programming language and development framework you use.
Each recipe includes one or two problem statements, with easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions for solving them, as well as examples using HTTP requests and responses, and XML, JSON, and Atom snippets. You'll also get implementation guidelines, and a discussion of the pros, cons, and trade-offs that come with each solution.
13.Apis: A Strategy Guide
Author: Daniel Jacobson (Author), Greg Brail (Contributor), Dan Woods (Contributor)
Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (December 27, 2011)
Programmers used to be the only people excited about Apis, but now a growing number of companies see them as a hot new product channel. This concise guide describes the tremendous business potential of Apis, and demonstrates how you can use them to provide valuable services to clients, partners, or the public via the Internet. You'll learn all the steps necessary for building a cohesive Api business strategy from experts in the trenches. Facebook and Twitter Apis continue to be extremely successful, and many other companies find that Api demand greatly exceeds website traffic. This book offers executives, business development teams, and other key players a complete roadmap for creating a viable Api product. Learn about the rise of Apis and why your business might need one Understand the roles of asset owners, providers, and developers in the Api value chain Build strategies for designing, implementing, and marketing your product Devise an effective process for security and user management Address legal issues, such as rights management and terms of use Manage traffic and user experience with a reliable operating model Determine the metrics you need to measure your Api's success
14.REST API Development with Node.js: Manage and Understand the Full Capabilities of Successful REST Development
Author: Fernando Doglio
Publisher: Apress; 2nd ed. edition (July 19, 2018)
Manage and understand the full capabilities of successful REST development. REST API development is a hot topic in the programming world, but not many resources exist for developers to really understand how you can leverage the advantages.
This completely updated second edition provides a brief background on REST and the tools it provides (well known and not so well known), then explains how there is more to REST than just JSON and URLs. You will learn about the maintained modules currently available in the npm community, including Express, Restify, Vatican, and Swagger. Finally you will code an example API from start to finish, using a subset of the tools covered.
The Node community is currently flooded with modules; some of them are published once and never updated again - cluttering the entire universe of packages. Pro REST API Development with Node.js shines light into that black hole of modules for the developers trying to create an API. Understand REST API development with Node.js using this book today.
15.RESTful Web API Design with Node.js - Second Edition
Author: Valentin Bojinov
Publisher: Packt Publishing; 2nd Revised edition edition (May 26, 2016)
This book will help you enrich your development skills to create scalable, server-side, RESTful applications based on the Node.js platform.
Starting with the fundamentals of REST, you will understand why RESTful web services are better data provisioning solution than other technologies. You will start setting up a development environment by installing Node.js, Express.js, and other modules. Next, you will write a simple HTTP request handler and create and test Node.js modules using automated tests and mock objects. You will then have to choose the most appropriate data storage type, having options between a key/value or document data store, and also you will implement automated tests for it. This module will evolve chapter by chapter until it turns into a full-fledged and secure Restful service.
