REST

Effective REST Services via .NET: For .NET Framework 3.5
$49.99
I have resisted reading about and digging into REST for a while now. Every time I would pick up an article or book I felt like I transported back to the 90's and I was reading an old HTML 2.0 book or specification. The stuff I started on the internet with. To me the REST movement is kind of like the A-HA moment of the internet programming community. Kind of like, "O... that is what they intended".

This book brought all those back in time feelings up all throughout the first 2 chapters. I must say though, that I thoroughly enjoyed reading them. The history lesson and the state of things today, where very well written and kept my attention and interest throughout both chapters. The author's do a great job of digging into the guts of the foundations of REST, which really helps in the later chapters when they discuss the .NET tools used to develop RESTful solutions.

I also like that the authors aren't RESTful zealots. They give Web Services their rightful place and do not present REST as a new silver bullet, but rather a new tool for the tool belt.

They cover a ton of stuff in the remaining chapters and appendixes including using RESTful services from desktop applications using Windows Forms and WPF, using Silverlight 2.0, JavaScript, the ASP.NET MVC Framework, WCF 3.5, IIS 7.0, and Azure. Every chapter goes deep enough into the topic to give you a great start down the right path of using the technology.

The book is a very pleasant read and is well organized.

The downloadable code is very usable, well organized, and contains some great example implementations.

I also have noticed the authors are keeping the accompanying web site up to date and have already released a code fix.

If you want to learn the ins and outs of RESTful Services using .NET technologies, this book is the ticket.

I highly recommend this book.

Programming Amazon Web Services: S3, EC2, SQS, FPS, and SimpleDB
$49.99
As mentioned in other reviews of this book, there are a lot of Ruby examples. If this book were completely written using Java or C#, this would have been a 4-5 star book. If nothing else, include examples with other languages as well.

Java Web Services: Up and Running
$34.99
I did learn a lot which is all that you can ask for. The book is thin - less than 300 pages, and the author writes in a good conversational style. It is a good tutorial but it probably does not make a good reference as it does not go into too much detail in some places. For example it does not explain how to create a handler when it returns a false value (how is the response created?), and a little more detail on the client side BARE style. Also, the code examples do not use logging correctly. But these are very small annoyances compared to the overall learning.

Restful Web Services
$39.99
It is a good buy for developers who have an experience playing around with ruby code because most of the code snippets in the book is coded in ruby. It does have java snippets but very few.

This book does cover some good aspects of restlet but don't get into any security aspects also it is little outdates at this point because it does not cover any of the JAX-RS implementations(Jersey or RestEasy).