RESTful Web API Design with Node.js (Second Edition)

RESTful Web API Design with Node.js (Second Edition)

This book is supposed to teach you about building RESTful web services with Node.js. I have a couple of problems with it:

The author is clearly coming from the JAVA/SOAP ecosystem and uses suspicious technologies such as XML and Eclipse IDE (in 2016!!). The book also tries to teach you Node and NoSQL when that's probably not what the reader wants to learn from this book. Besides that, the author's writing style is not commendable at all. Still there are little nuggets of good information here and there and you can refer to the notes below for finding the valuable parts.

All in all - a really sloppy book and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who takes their programming career seriously.

Notes:

1. What You Did Not Know

This chapter contains a basic overview of the REST architecture. Nothing special really. The title is assuming that the reader knows nothing about REST and it's a little clickbait-y and possibly insulting.

2. Getting Started with Node.js

The chapter starts with: "In this chapter, you will gain your first real experience with Node.js". Again the author is assuming that the reader doesn't know anything about Node and the writing style can possibly insult some readers. This chapter doesn't really belong in a book like this. Other resources are far more suitable for learning Node.

3. Building a Typical Web API

So this is the most important chapter in this book, right?

• pg. 40 - The table is erratic in several places. The express-generator is needlessly explained. Synchronous methods are being used, underscore naming conventions mixed with camel-case etc. etc. Horrible code style.
• pg. 56 - Cross-origin resource sharing overview.

4. Using NoSQL Databases

A pretty much unnecessary chapter.

• pg 84 - Again, POST and PUT are replaced in the bullet-point list. This book has had a reviewer and these kinds of errors are still in the book? Unforgivable.

5. Implementing a Fully-Fledged RESTful Service

• pg. 104/105 - Cache-Control header and express module for abstracting caching (express-cache-control).

6. Keeping the Bad Guys Out

This is the API security chapter.

• pg. 114 - Basic Authentication overview and example using the basic-auth module.
• pg. 118 - passport module's basic authentication strategy.
• pg. 123 - Authorization overview.
• pg. 127 - Difference between the 403 Forbidden and 405 Not Allowed HTTP status codes. Use 403 when the user is not authorized and 405 when a particular HTTP method is not allowed to be used.
• pg. 127 - response.closed property.
• pg. 128 - TLS (Transport Level Security)