7 Best-Selling REST API Books Millions Love

Subbu Allamaraju's decades of hands-on experience at eBay and Yahoo! shaped this book into a practical guide for mastering RESTful web services. You gain concrete skills for designing scalable, reliable, and secure REST APIs, with detailed recipes covering resource design, HTTP usage, caching, concurrency, and OAuth security. For instance, the book breaks down how to implement hypertext-driven APIs using link headers, and tackles advanced topics like batch processing and partial updates. This is ideal if you want to deepen your understanding beyond theory and build robust web services that perform well across diverse environments.

What if everything you thought about building enterprise systems was ripe for reconsideration? Jim Webber and his co-authors challenge the conventional SOA mindset by focusing on how REST principles can yield simpler, more scalable distributed systems. You’ll explore how to leverage HTTP and hypermedia to design robust APIs that evolve gracefully as businesses grow—from handling CRUD operations to securing multi-party interactions with AtomPub. The book dives into practical ways to apply web standards for integration, event-driven computing, and even touches on the impact of the Semantic Web. If you're tackling complex enterprise applications and want a fresh perspective grounded in real-world web architecture, this book offers clear, concrete insights without the usual buzzwords.

This book explores proven REST API methods tailored to your background and goals, focusing on building scalable and robust services. By combining widely validated approaches with your specific interests, it reveals best practices for designing APIs that handle growth and complexity efficiently. The book carefully covers core REST principles, request handling, error management, security considerations, and performance tuning, ensuring the content matches your experience and learning objectives. With this tailored content, you dive deep into the practicalities of crafting APIs that remain reliable and maintainable in real-world environments. This personalized approach helps you focus on what matters most for your projects, making your learning journey both effective and engaging.

Mark Masse's extensive background in engineering and architecture at ESPN and Disney shapes this focused guide on REST API design. Instead of broad theory, you get a clear framework, including his Web Resource Modeling Language (WRML), to craft APIs that align with web standards. You'll learn how to structure URIs, apply HTTP methods and status codes correctly, and handle media types and metadata effectively. Designed for developers and architects alike, this book clarifies how to design REST APIs that are configurable rather than hardcoded, making it a go-to reference for building consistent, scalable web services.

What happens when deep expertise in ASP.NET meets the urgent need for secure RESTful services? Badrinarayanan Lakshmiraghavan, a seasoned authority in web security, unpacks the limitations of traditional WCF protocols and introduces a SOAP-less security model tailored for ASP.NET Web API. You learn how to protect your services across diverse clients—from JavaScript frontends to smart devices—leveraging HTTP-based security that integrates seamlessly with ASP.NET MVC. The book delves into practical implementation details, including token-based authentication and authorization frameworks, equipping you to build resilient, scalable APIs. If you’re a developer aiming to safeguard your web services without the overhead of SOAP, this book offers a focused, technically rich guide.

What started as a clear need for practical guidance in ASP.NET Web API development became a detailed resource with this book. Badrinarayanan Lakshmiraghavan, an experienced developer, guides you through writing working code from the outset, allowing you to grasp core concepts like request binding and response formatting through hands-on examples. The book walks you through progressively complex topics such as request validation, creating loosely coupled controllers, and extending the pipeline for security and unit testing. If you're looking to deepen your skills in building robust, maintainable web APIs using ASP.NET, this book offers focused insights without unnecessary theory.

This tailored book offers a focused exploration of REST API techniques crafted specifically to match your background and aspirations. It examines core REST principles and delves into practical, rapid approaches to designing, developing, and securing RESTful services. By concentrating on your unique interests and goals, it reveals how to accelerate your skills through concise, actionable daily lessons. The personalized content highlights efficient API design patterns, performance considerations, and real-world use cases to foster confident implementation. This approach makes the learning experience more relevant and engaging by addressing what matters most to you, fostering deeper understanding and skill mastery in REST API development.

When Leonard Richardson and his co-authors set out to write this book, they tackled a common pitfall in API design: many so-called RESTful APIs miss the mark on REST’s core principles, leading to less flexible and scalable systems. You get a clear-eyed explanation of how to build APIs that truly embrace REST's architecture, emphasizing hypermedia controls and evolving interfaces. The book dives into practical strategies like the collection pattern and leveraging standards such as JSON-LD, making it especially useful if you want to design APIs that remain robust over time and across diverse platforms. If you’re building or maintaining web services that need to grow without breaking, this book offers the insights you need.

Bill Burke draws from his extensive experience as a JBoss architect and contributor to RESTEasy to deliver a focused guide on implementing RESTful web services in Java. You’ll explore practical aspects of JAX-RS 2.0, including client APIs, asynchronous HTTP, and filters, with clear examples like an e-commerce order entry system design. This book is tailored for developers seeking hands-on mastery of distributed services using Java EE 7, covering integration with frameworks such as Spring and JPA, and modern authentication methods like OAuth 2.0. If you want a technical, example-driven approach to RESTful Java development, this book aligns well with your goals.