Ask Lobsters: What are the best resources for learning REST properly?

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Ask Lobsters: What are the best resources for learning REST properly? ☶ show book networking release scaling web
via moses 6 years ago | 3 comments

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I have heard a lot about people misusing REST, and I would rather do it properly than improperly when writing an API for myself, since it seems like I could learn something about good APIs, since the people who came up with REST thought so long about how they should work. What are the best resources you have used for learning REST?

Rather than a how-to, which seem straightforward, I am looking for something which explains what is supposed to be going on semantically so that if I run into a problem where I don’t know what the RESTful way of doing something is, I can just think about what it is supposed to do semantically and reason from that.

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steveklabnik edited 6 years ago | link
Read this stuff:
- http://tomayko.com/writings/rest-to-my-wife
- http://www.infoq.com/articles/webber-rest-workflow
Then read this:
- http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch_style.htm
- http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven
Then read the whole thesis, not just chapter 5.

Then this:
- http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2012-02-23-rest-is-over
Read the books here:
- http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2012-02-27-hypermedia-api-reading-list
and then, finally, where I display my bias:
- http://designinghypermediaapis.com/
I’m happy to answer any specific questions about any of this.
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  tef 6 years ago | link
  
  This talk is fantastic: http://vimeo.com/20781278
  
  This model is pretty good too: http://martinfowler.com/articles/richardsonMaturityModel.html
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    steveklabnik 6 years ago | link
    
    :+1: to both of these, for sure.