ASP.NET Web API 2: Building a REST Service from Start to Finish 2nd ed. Edition

This is a very useful and enjoyable read.Jamie and Brian maintain a conversational tone throughout the book, while offering well documented and practical solutions. I worked through the sample application in the book and found it a useful learning experience. Depending on experience level it is possible to just read the text and have a lot of take-aways.There are some complaints scattered throughout the reviews that this book focuses too much on technologies other than vanilla Web API. This is an intermediate text and the title even states "...from Start to Finish." This includes data access, security, type mapping, inversion of control, logging, unit-testing, and mocking - the whole gambit. The sample application in the book is more than a simple overview of Web API - it is a real world enterprise quality application.I definitely recommend this book for any intermediate level .NET developers or any other developers with previous experience writing APIs.

This book was actually pretty close to what I needed for a project. It does go over a lot of material that might not seem like it fits in the realm of Web API, such as DI, object mapping, ORMs, hypermedia, etc. But what that meant for me was that it had all of the material required to give me a jump-start on architecting my current project. The writing is fairly casual, but that didn't detract too much from the reading. I don't think that I will be referring back to the book now that I've got a good idea of how to do what the author talks about, but I didn't expect this short of a book to be encyclopedic, anyway. Overall, it was a good introduction to best practices in the Web API world, which was really what I required.

This book is a perfect example of how NOT to write a computer book. I can usually muddle through these books; however, the poor, or actually non-existence explanations, made this book an impossible read. While I see several good reviews, further reading of those reviews indicate the reader is just getting into the first couple chapters, or they are grateful the book arrived quickly.First, it states Visual Studio Ultimate was used. Hey, most of us learning are using the free Microsoft downloads, so lets have the book use one of those products. Or better yet, provided use with a free version of VS Ultimate that does not expire.While code is provided, it is the complete project. The author indicates that readers can use it so as to not spend time typing, and can concentrate on learning. Unfortunately, as you read through the process of building the API, the code is built upon. As a result, the reader cannot just copy and paste from the provided code because it has more in it than the topic being explained. If the complete code is pasted into your project, it won't work. Therefore, you spend hours either typing the code or trying to filter out just what is needed at that point in the book.There are places in the book where the author asks the reader to enter some code and states "and then we'll review what's going on with all this" But guess what! There is no review of what is going on with the code. I guess the authors forgot that readers might want to understand the dozens of lines that were just written.Or how about on page 66 where the author wants the read to implement the WebAPIConfig class.... but DOES NOT tell the reader where the class should be saved.When changes are made to an existing piece of code, the authors were too lazy to mark the code that was updated - for example, bold the text of the changed code. So what does that mean to the reader? Readers must waste their valuable time looking at the entire class to determine what was changed. These authors have no respect for their readers by thinking we have time to waste trying to figure out what single line out of 30 was modified - example: page 106.This book takes incompetent writing to new levels. These authors should be ashamed of themselves for compiling a book that is next to worthless. It does not even rate 1 star.

In a nutshell, this book has way too much about stuff that isn't Web API. I do realize that Web API is not a technology to be used in a vacuum, that it is part of an integrated whole product, but this book seems to go on forever about using Ninject, nHibernate, log4net, and other technologies. No doubt these technologies are important, but if I wanted to learn Ninject, I would have bought a book about Ninject.Also, this book is printed in small text with quarter-inch margins, so even tho it is listed as having 250 pages, it would probably fill 400 the way most tech books are printed. If you don't have good vision, I hope you have reading glasses.In short, if you want a clear, concise book about ASP.net Web API, this isn't it.

Good book to understand the ASP.NET API for writing RESTful services. Light in concepts. Part of it is due to the tools and work frame provided by Microsoft. There are some items that have been omitted under the assumption that the reader is conversant on the Microsoft tools. A simple statement could help individuals better follow and provide a better understanding of what goes on. Will be sending a message with some suggestions to the authors in the near future.