Saturday, December 21, 2013

Book Review for "RESTful Java with JAX-RS 2.0, Second Edition"







This book covers Jax-RS in great detail.  It's a big book, nearly 400 pages and all of it densely populated with information.  The author (who is the lead for JBoss's Jax-RS implementation) has comprehensive knowledge of the topic, and puts this knowledge into easily transferable form.  All things considered, this is an excellent book.

The book is divided into two parts, which I think of as "theory" and "practice".

The first half of the book starts with an introduction to REST and HTTP, then gives an overview of how RESTful architecture can be applied to a typical application.   These chapters are followed by explanations of the Jax-RS spec and how the various components are used.

There's a great deal of information here, some of the topics covered include basic service construction, extraction of information from an HTTP request, Jax-RS Injection, Exception Handling, client API, filters and interceptors, and more.  There are some especially handy chapters on security, deployment and integration.  These tell you how your RESTful applications should be packaged, deployed and protected in their runtime environment.

The second half of the book is a 'workbook' that includes examples that correlate to the chapters in the first half of the book.  These are well explained (including basics of Maven) and discuss both server and client components as needed.

Together, these components provide a detailed explanation of Jax-RS and it's entire ecosystem.  The book will serve equally well as an introduction and as a reference.  (Did I mention it's comprehensive?) 

Final words:  If you have an interest in Jax-RS, this book should be on your must-have list.  It explains the hows and whys and will take you from your first RESTful service through nearly any real-world use case.

Disclaimer:  I work for the same company as this book's author, Bill Burke.  I have no reservations about giving this book a 'good' review, as I am confident any objective reader will likely agree.

The book can be found here.

Happy RESTing!

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