When I was contacted by a representative of Packt Publishing to review RESTful PHP Web Services by Samisa Abeysinghe, I was naturally interested. After all, I've written and spoken a lot about representational state transfer (REST). But I was also skeptical because plenty of people these days talk about RESTful web services, but they don't really explain REST.
Abeysinghe approaches the topic from a very practical level. From the very first chapter to the last, RESTful PHP is chock full of code samples and discussion of tools to access and build RESTful services. The problem, though, as Lorna Mitchell points out, is that "[v]ery few services that claim to be RESTful actually are, which makes writing anything along these lines very tricky." I agree. I would have liked to have seen a more critical look at the so-called RESTful services profiled in the book, with the author explaining the principles of REST by showing how the services examined are or are not RESTful.








