September 2013
Intermediate to advanced
406 pages
10h 35m
English
Content preview from RESTful Web APIsBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 1. Surfing the Web
The World Wide Web became popular because ordinary people can use it to do really useful things with minimal training. But behind the scenes, the Web is also a powerful platform for distributed computing.
The principles that make the Web usable by ordinary people also work when the “user” is an automated software agent. A piece of software designed to transfer money between bank accounts (or carry out any other real-world task) can accomplish the task using the same basic technologies a human being would use.
As far as this book is concerned, the Web is based on three technologies: the URL naming convention, the HTTP protocol, and the HTML document format. URL and HTTP are simple, but to apply them to distributed programming you must understand them in more detail than the average web developer does. The first few chapters of this book are dedicated to giving you this understanding.
The story of HTML is a little more complicated. In the world of web APIs, there are dozens of data formats competing to take the place of HTML. An exploration of these formats will take up several chapters of this book, starting in Chapter 5. For now, I want to focus on URL and HTTP, and use HTML solely as an example.
I’m going to start off by telling a simple story about the World Wide Web, as a way of explaining the principles behind its design and the reasons for its success. The story needs to be simple because although you’re certainly familiar with the Web, you might not ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.