Sam Ruby

What a waste of time. The entire book reads like a frustrated high school debater saying, "You're right, but I still think it would be better if I was right instead."

Richardson & Ruby "coin" the term Resource Oriented Architectures, by pointing out that it is actually a term previous used by a 2004 paper from James Snell, but they don't like the way he defined it so they are going to abscond with it and rework it.

They give very little insight into the possible benefits of their style of show more RESTful services, instead they spend a lot of time deriding "Big Style" web services, RESTful-RPC hybids, and other non-pure systems.

What I found really enlightening is how much the authors struggled to find successful RESTful examples. Everything from flickr, to Google, to del.icio.us, to Amazon have been doing it wrong and at best, the authors explain, are only half-assing it with RESTful-RPC.

All that tells me is that either the authors are the smartest guys in the world and can see what some of the web's best engineers cannot; or, REST simply isn't that compelling.

The book also simply is a failure at explaining what REST is and isn't. They make confusing and arbitrary delineations between one design decisions being RESTful and another not.

For example:
http://www.somesite.com/rest-service?method=search&q=penguins
and
http://www.somesite.com/rest-services/search?q=penguins

The first one, not RESTful, second one yes. The authors explain that the method should be the HTTP method: GET, PUT, POST, DELETE, etc.

The second URI invokes GET on the resource /search and passes some "scoping" information as "q=penguins." So for the search we can a scope of penguins.

I say that the first is the same. You invoke GET on /rest-service and pass a scope of ?method=search&q=penguins. At some point you are just going to get into semantics, especially once you get past trivial search examples.

They do similar fudging with RESTful services need to be stateless., but they use examples that must have some idea of who is doing them. If you pass the sessionID as a URI param, ok, as a cookie, you are not RESTful. Which makes sense in terms of caching servers, but on write operations, why do you want to cache?

The whole book is about proselytizing REST, usually by denouncing the false religions. It does not offer the reader a new set of skills and an honest discussion of what REST is good for and when should look elsewhere. There is not good discussion of the limitations of REST.

What do I do when the data I need to pass in exceeds the 1024 limit of a URL? What if I would want to create a set of simple atomic methods, but I have clients that would like to make coarse grain calls by bundling many requests into one call? What if I would like to allow clients to pipe these bundles request together. And what is the difference between the buzz phrase "Javascript on Demand (JoD)" and all that other JS that I just fetched from the web. show less

A good book to have read at some point for historical reasons - DHH's involvement kind of makes that an imperative. However, it's dated (actually pre 1.0) so many of the specifics are no longer correct or recommended, and it misses big chunks of what is now conventional rails (RESTful routes for example). A better source for current practice (at least until 3.0) is The Rails Way by Obie Fernandez

I am not a fan of Dave Thomas. I prefer less chatty books with more detailed discussion. That being said, this is a great book to dive into Rails apps. and Dave's style is really very appropriate for the kind of fast, fun, satisfying experience that Rails development can offer. Man, the language has changed so much over such a short period of time that my version is practically useless now! Well, truth be known, after you have completed the example project the book is pretty useless anyway. show more In a way, it is like test driving a car but the dealer makes you pay for the ride. It really is just a walk-through of an example program and very little more. But the example introduces you to the main activities of Rails programming and after completion one feels pretty confident. Why four stars you ask? Cause it's funner than a jigsaw puzzle on a rainy Sunday! show less

A good book to have read at some point for historical reasons - DHH's involvement kind of makes that an imperative. However, it's dated (actually pre 1.0) so many of the specifics are no longer correct or recommended, and it misses big chunks of what is now conventional rails (RESTful routes for example). A better source for current practice (at least until 3.0) is The Rails Way by Obie Fernandez