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REST in Practice in editing/review/correction state and available on Amazon

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REST in Practice It's been a loooooong road, I think it might even be more than 2 3 years. Jim and I had talked about writing a book together about the Web, its design principles, its technologies, and its potential role in distributed applications. We love working together so we wanted this to be our next project. Little we knew it would have taken so long. Many of the original ideas got revised along the way, Jim changed continents, I changed 3 different teams, Restfulie got inspired from our Chapter 5 even before its publication, we talked to publishers and at the end we were in the fortunate position that we had to actually choose amongst them, and we even invited a third co-author to join us. It was apparent that we needed help. Ian Robinson joined us relatively early in the project. Jim knew him from ThoughtWorks and I got to know him along the way and realized why Jim thought so highly of him. His knowledge of Web technologies is amazing and he's great to work with.

There have been heated moments, periods of hard work, and periods of not-so-hard work. I now know that I should have followed the advice Jim Gray once gave me about writing a book. Something along the lines of "take few months off and go finish the thing". That's how he wrote his famous book on Transaction Processing with Andreas Reuter.

Last night, I was the last of the co-authors to check in the last remaining chapter, the "Semantics" one. Of course, we are not done with the hard work. We need to review some of the chapters amongst us, apply the feedback that we get both from our own reviewers and then from O'Reilly's ones, build a website, etc. However, there is now an end-to-end first draft and, to us, that's a huge milestone.

O'Reilly has made "REST in Practice" available on Amazon with a publication date of September 2010. Jim has already blogged about it. He also mentioned the many people that have helped us along the way. I'd very much like to extend my personal thanks to them again (and will do so again in the future). Their help, throughout the last year in particular, has been amazing. Quoting Jim from his post on REST in Practice available for pre-order on Amazon:

"...big thanks go out to Solomon Duskis , Rafael de F. Ferreira , Glen Ford , Martin Fowler , Colin Jack , Ken Kolchier , Eric Newcomer , Chris Read , Ryan Riley , Scott Shaw , Guilherme Silveira , Halvard Skogsrud , Nigel Small , Stefan Tilkov , Jon Tirsen , Spiros Tzavellas , Steve Vinoski , Lasse Westh-Nielsen , Herbj rn Wilhelmsen , and everyone else who helped review proposals, provide feedback on chapters, made cups of tea or was otherwise understanding."

Here's where you can find out more about our book:

Stay tuned for more information about the book and our next project 🙂

2 responses to “REST in Practice in editing/review/correction state and available on Amazon”

  1. Jim Webber

    Actually Halvard Skogsrud and I wrote the first example for what has now become Chapter 3 when we both Lived in Sydney. Considering I left Sydney a little over 3 years ago, it’s been a bit longer of a slog that you’d think.

    But the book we’ve written today is worth it. The time taken to understand the Web, and to see how it’s played out in practice has been very worthwhile.

    Here’s to the next collaboration!

    Jim

  2. Ian Robinson

    It’s definitely been over three years! I wrote the first (poor) draft of the caching chapter in May/June 2007 – back when we were going to do a chapter each a month, and the tone was brash and jokey. Fast forward three years, with lots of Atom and AtomPub and some hypermedia, and the last piece of writing I checked in was… caching.

    There’ve been lots of intensively productive periods, some droughts, and a few highly emotional episodes, but I’m enormously grateful for you having invited me to help write book; I’m very proud of what we’ve done, and very pleased that besides a book and all the knowledge it encapsualates, I’ve gained another friend.

    ian