The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master
You’ll find The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master on many software developers’ must-read books lists. After reading it from cover to cover, I’ve added it to my essential reading list as well.
It’s not a book for beginners, though. The subtitle of the book, “From Journeyman to Master” sums it up. The Pragmatic Programmer describes the skills, attributes, and attitudes that a mid-level programmer needs to become a professional developer.
Its purpose is to distill the wisdom gathered from a career in programming into about 70 tips. Each of these tips is explained and illustrated with examples that most programmers will find familiar.
The tips are not necessarily about writing code. The authors, Andrew Hunt and David Thomas, take a holistic approach to the craft of programming. They cover topics like communicating effectively, planning and scheduling, and building teams.
I’d read somewhere that you can judge the quality of a craftsman by the quality of his tools. The Pragmatic Programmer is a book I’d expect to see on any professional developer’s shelf.
As we mentioned recently, we’re building the infovark server using the REST pattern. Since REST is more a loose set of guidelines than a strict series of rules, it’s hard for implementers to know where to begin.
OK, you could go to the source, chapter 5 of Roy Fielding’s dissertation. Or you could check out the somewhat academic discussions on the REST wiki, though there hasn’t been much activity lately. You can occasionally find good advice from the odd blog post, like the REST for the Rest of Us article at Open Garden. But ironically, there’s not a whole lot of material about implementing REST web services available on the web yet. (If you know of good links, leave a comment.)
RESTful Web Services
For the practical, gritty details of how it’s actually done, you’ll need the Restful Web Services book by Sam Ruby and Leonard Richardson. They describe the principles that inform REST-ian (RESTafarian?) design in detail, taking you step-by-step through two different sample applications. If you’re a Ruby programmer using Rails, you’ll find the book especially valuable, since that’s the language and framework in which most of the examples are done. For those of us using different technology, it’s the thought process behind the examples that is most illuminating.
This is because the key challenge of the REST paradigm is the fact that it can’t really be implemented on today’s web without some workarounds. REST will come into its own with HTML 5. The book steers an interesting course between how REST web services might be done in HTML 5 with how they must be done today. I think the authors get the balance right, but at times it can make for a frustrating read for someone wanting practical advice about building a REST service right now.
But that’s less a criticism of the book than of the openness of the REST concept itself. The occasional what-if digression the authors make is a small price to pay for the amount of sound guidance you get. The appendixes alone, which discuss things like which HTTP status codes and headers are worth implementing and which are worth forgetting, will save you far more time than you’ll lose in reading how great things will be when HTML forms finally support the PUT method.
Until that day comes, keep this book handy.