This is the kind of book that I love O'Reily for. Richardson and Ruby have taken what can be and too often is treated as an arcane subject, and pulled out the core concepts.
The book should be read in the abstract. I have never coded with Ruby or Rails, but that is not the point. The authors distill just what is HTTP and how it works, and lay out, using the basic built-in functionality of http, how you can create intelligent and useful web services and clients. And what do you know - coding with the http protocol in mind naturally results in your writing ReSTful applications. This is what sticks in my head about this book, just that simple concept.
This book really takes you to the core of how the web works - sending http requests and getting http responses. That is it, nothing more. Now many frameworks exist to add functionality to this basic request/response pattern. But until you understand the core concepts, you will never really know how to code for the web. And advanced frameworks often make matters worse by hiding what is really going on so much that developers can spend days learning the framework and missing what is fundamentally going on.
In my opinion, ReSTful web services is a nice application of core http, a good way to illustrate how the web works, and how to work with the web, instead of against it. A book solely dedicated to http would likely get bogged down in unused standards and technical detail.
But this book really nails down what programming on the web means, and how to write well-behaved applications. While I may never code in Ruby, or make a web client to interface with flickr, what I learned in this book will serve as a foundation for all of my future web work. And I am deeply grateful for that.
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