When I started exploring Cloud computing, REST was a topic that popped up over and over. So I purchased two books to read on a four day weekend out of town earlier this year.
“RESTful .Net” by Jon Flanders – This book was very deep, in many ways too deep. While it can often be important to understand every nuance on a technology, I felt the book confused the learning by talking about the variety of approaches in multiple versions of the .Net framework. It would have been nice if this book would have focused on the “recommended” approach in the current framework, saving variations and advanced details for later sections or appendixes. I suppose now that I have a better understanding of REST, this book would make more sense, but as a first attempt at learning REST, I recommending looking elsewhere.
“Data-Driven Services with Silverlight 2” by John Papa (Foreword by Tim Heuer) – This book is “that book” to use as a first introduction to REST. Although this book covers REST in only three of the eleven chapters (plus a chapter on ADO.Net Data Services), the descriptions are very straight forward and step-by-step. Examples of using LINQ to XML and JSON are included when discussing consuming the REST services. As a bonus to REST, the book obviously covers Silverlight, focusing on data-binding. The discussion on two-way binding and converters was very enlightening.