REST API Design Rulebook: Designing Consistent RESTful Web Service Interfaces

Mark Masse

Oct 2011 · "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

About this ebook

In todayâ??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 Webâ??s REST architectural style. Along with rules for URI design and HTTP use, youâ??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.

• Learn design rules for addressing resources with URIs
• Apply design principles to HTTPâ??s request methods and response status codes
• Work with guidelines for conveying metadata through HTTP headers and media types
• Get design tips to address the needs of client programs, including the special needs of browser-based JavaScript clients
• Understand why REST APIs should be designed and configured, not coded

Ratings and reviews

The book provides a well structured list of useful tips and best practices on how to design your restful API. I recommend checking all the rules provided in this book before you start implementing your restuful API, or whenever you are in doubts what should be the naming convention, URIs structure, or content shape of your API. One thing that I did not really find valuable though is the number of chapters dedicated to the author's invented framework called WRML. The latter obviously did not gain much popularity in the industry, and I am not aware of any people who use it or even heard about it.

If you pretend to be a serious Web engineer/developer, you must read this book.

Good Book for Learning API

About the author

Mark Masse resides in Seattle, where he is a Senior Director of Engineering at ESPN. Mark has fourteen years of engineering, management, and architecture experience with The Walt Disney Company. He began his career with Starwave creating rich, interactive Java applets for ESPN Sportszone, NFL.com, and NASCAR Online. Mark architected and developed the content management system (CMS) that powers all of the Disney web sites including ESPN.com, ABC.com and Disney.com. In 2008, he received a "Disney Inventor Award" for creating a "System and Method for Determining the Data Model Used to Create a Web Page."