# "RESTful Web Services" **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [June 8, 2007, 6:02am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/restful-web-services/106295 "2007-06-08T06:02:19Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![iceburgh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/i/c4cdca/32.png) [@iceburgh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/iceburgh)\ **Post date:** [June 8, 2007, 6:02am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/restful-web-services/106295/1 "2007-06-08T06:02:19Z")
I’ve been reading RESTful Web Services Leonard Richardson & Sam Ruby O’Reilly, 2007 Aside from being an interesting and well-written book on the topic, I was pleased to find that it uses Ruby for all of its code examples. ## -r [http://www.cfcl.com/rdm](http://www.cfcl.com/rdm) Rich M. [http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/resume](http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/resume) removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid [http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog](http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog) +1 650-873-7841 Technical editing and writing, programming, and web development ---
**Author:** ![iceburgh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/i/c4cdca/32.png) [@iceburgh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/iceburgh)\ **Post date:** [June 8, 2007, 1:23pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/restful-web-services/106295/2 "2007-06-08T13:23:11Z")
Hi – On Fri, 8 Jun 2007, Rich M. wrote: > I’ve been reading > > RESTful Web Services > Leonard Richardson & Sam Ruby > O’Reilly, 2007 > > Aside from being an interesting and well-written book on > the topic, I was pleased to find that it uses Ruby for > all of its code examples. That is indeed cool. I remember when Jack Herrington’s book on code generation came out in 2003, also using Ruby for its examples – definitely a nice way to raise Ruby awareness and demonstrate the language’s strengths. David ---
**Author:** ![iceburgh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/i/c4cdca/32.png) [@iceburgh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/iceburgh)\ **Post date:** [June 8, 2007, 2:19pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/restful-web-services/106295/3 "2007-06-08T14:19:20Z")
On Jun 7, 2007, at 11:00 PM, Rich M. wrote: > I’ve been reading > > RESTful Web Services > Leonard Richardson & Sam Ruby > O’Reilly, 2007 > > Aside from being an interesting and well-written book on > the topic, I was pleased to find that it uses Ruby for > all of its code examples. I picked that up recently too and agree that it’s a really well written book … at least what I’ve read so far. ---
**Author:** ![iceburgh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/i/c4cdca/32.png) [@iceburgh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/iceburgh)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2007, 8:32pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/restful-web-services/106295/4 "2007-06-09T20:32:34Z")
> That is indeed cool. I remember when Jack Herrington’s book on code > generation came out in 2003, also using Ruby for its examples – > definitely a nice way to raise Ruby awareness and demonstrate the > language’s strengths. Can I just say that this is an absurdly under-rated book? Admittedly I skipped a lot of its parts, especially the Java stuff, which I think he only threw in because he had to, but it very much turned my brain sideways. My new theory, based on this book, is that Unix is Lisp with a compilation phase. Think about it - how many times have you written shell scripts to generate new shell scripts, or to generate new lists of shell commands? How many shell commands do you invoke with a list of files? Unix is all code generation and lists. It’s Lisp in a different form. Anyway, long story short, “Code Generation in Action,” awesome. – Giles B. Blog: [http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com](http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com) Portfolio: [http://www.gilesgoatboy.org](http://www.gilesgoatboy.org) ---
**Author:** ![iceburgh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/i/c4cdca/32.png) [@iceburgh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/iceburgh)\ **Post date:** [June 10, 2007, 5:34am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/restful-web-services/106295/5 "2007-06-10T05:34:31Z")
[code generation in action tangent] > > sideways. My new theory, based on this book, is that Unix is Lisp with > > a compilation phase. Think about it - how many times have you written > also built into the first versions of Unix. > > I guess I should get the book. 😉 Well, it’s kind of my own theory based off the book, but it is an excellent book. I say it that way because of the Paul Graham thing, praise for Lisp macros, where you have a language sufficiently malleable to adapt it to the program you’re building in it. Being able to write programs which generate Unix commands is kind of the same experience - the “compilation phase” comes when you save a shell script to a text file, or especially when you save a list of files to a text file, save a Perl script which writes a shell script for you to a Perl file, run that Perl file to generate that shell script, and pass it that text file containing a list of files. In Lisp you’d do it all with macros; in Unix you’re saving it to the drive. But it’s still, in either case, code which generates code and handles lists. Might even be more a metaphor than a theory, but the whole idea of creating code which creates code, so that you can program at a very high level, that is actually totally available to anybody who writes code which runs on Unix. It’s not just a Lisp thing. – Giles B. Blog: [http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com](http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com) Portfolio: [http://www.gilesgoatboy.org](http://www.gilesgoatboy.org) ---
**Author:** ![iceburgh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/i/c4cdca/32.png) [@iceburgh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/iceburgh)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2007, 9:04pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/restful-web-services/106295/6 "2007-06-09T21:04:36Z")
Giles B. wrote: > shell scripts to generate new shell scripts, or to generate new lists > of shell commands? How many shell commands do you invoke with a list > of files? Unix is all code generation and lists. It’s Lisp in a > different form. > > Anyway, long story short, “Code Generation in Action,” awesome. Hmmm … well … I came to Unix fairly late in its evolution, having spent most of the previous time as an assembly language and FORTRAN programmer and having used a range of operating systems dating back to such primitive beasts as the IBM 7090 without disks to “modern” systems like Xerox CP-V and VAX/VMS. My first encounters with Unix were, coming from VAX/VMS, quite unpleasant. The editors didn’t make sense, the whole notion of shell scripting rather than command files didn’t seem useful, etc. I essentially used FORTRAN as a scripting language. What changed that was that the company I was working for, Floating Point Systems, merged with another company, Celerity Computing, that was making a Unix (4.3 BSD) product. Instantly I had colleagues who knew all this fancy Unix stuff, could write C code as well as I could write FORTRAN, etc. It was sink or swim so I learned to swim. But I don’t think Unix is as much about code generation and lists as it is, at least initially, about text processing. The whole philosophy at the time, before GUIs, etc., was that developers spent a lot of time dealing with text files, whether they be code, numeric data, documents or something else, so Unix should make that easy to automate. IIRC spell checking was built into the very first versions of Unix, for example. And I think the core idea of the Unix user interface is not Lisp, lambda calculus, and AI so much as it is the notion of regular expressions and the compiler-compiler. Again IIRC, lex and yacc were also built into the first versions of Unix. I guess I should get the book. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![iceburgh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/i/c4cdca/32.png) [@iceburgh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/iceburgh)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2007, 11:04pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/restful-web-services/106295/7 "2007-09-25T23:04:23Z")
On 6/7/07, Rich M. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > I’ve been reading > > RESTful Web Services > Leonard Richardson & Sam Ruby > O’Reilly, 2007 > > Aside from being an interesting and well-written book on > the topic, I was pleased to find that it uses Ruby for > all of its code examples. Yeah, Leonard Richardson was also a co-author of the well-reviewed Ruby Cookbook, so it’s no surprise: Ruby Cookbook Lucas Carlson & Leonard Richardson O’Reilly, 2006 [http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/rubyckbk/index.html](http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/rubyckbk/index.html) HTH, Keith ---
**Author:** ![iceburgh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/i/c4cdca/32.png) [@iceburgh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/iceburgh)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2007, 11:09pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/restful-web-services/106295/8 "2007-09-25T23:09:18Z")
Thank you for sharing this with us, are there any good books in Ruby and agent or multi-agent technology that you can recommend? Fatmah vasudevram [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > On 6/7/07, Rich M. wrote: Hey, that’s good news. Thanks for the info - I must check it out - REST is one of my interests. BTW, the book “Enterprise Integration with Ruby” by Maik Schmidt, published by the Pragmatic Bookshelf, is also a pretty good one - though its not only about REST, it does have some good code and text about it. I wrote a short review of it here: > **[jugad's Journal](https://jugad.livejournal.com/2007/04/15/)** > > Vasudev Ram's blog on software innovation ## Vasudev Ram ## Biz site: [http://www.dancingbison.com](http://www.dancingbison.com) Blog on software innovation: [http://jugad.livejournal.com](http://jugad.livejournal.com) PDF creation toolkit: [Conversion of other file formats to PDF download | SourceForge.net](http://sourceforge.net/projects/xtopdf) ---
**Author:** ![iceburgh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/i/c4cdca/32.png) [@iceburgh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/iceburgh)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2007, 11:05pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/restful-web-services/106295/9 "2007-09-25T23:05:39Z")
> > all of its code examples. Hey, that’s good news. Thanks for the info - I must check it out - REST is one of my interests. BTW, the book “Enterprise Integration with Ruby” by Maik Schmidt, published by the Pragmatic Bookshelf, is also a pretty good one - though its not only about REST, it does have some good code and text about it. I wrote a short review of it here: ``` http://jugad.livejournal.com/2007/04/15/ ``` Vasudev Ram