Product Description

Web API 2 is the latest evolution of Microsoft's web services toolkit, which allows the creation of RESTful applications built on the ASP.NET platform. It provides a standards-based approach and a high-productivity development model that makes it easy to deliver services to a wide-range of clients, including mobile devices.

This book puts Web API into context for the experienced MVC Framework developer and dives deep into the tools and techniques required to build Web API applications that integrate with the MVC Framework and shows you how to create single-page applications to consume them.

Best-selling author Adam Freeman explains how to get the most from Web API 2 by building on the foundation of the MVC Framework and the ASP.NET platform. He starts with the nuts-and-bolts and shows you everything through to advanced features, going in-depth to give you the knowledge you need.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #936038 in Books
• Published on: 2014-08-18
• Released on: 2014-08-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 9.25" h x 1.55" w x 7.50" l, .0 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 688 pages

About the Author
Adam Freeman is an experienced IT professional who has held senior positions in a range of companies, most recently serving as chief technology officer and chief operating officer of a global bank. Now retired, he spends his time writing and long-distance running.

Customer Reviews

Most helpful customer reviews

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Five Stars
By Shahzad Khan
Easy to understand writing style with working code examples.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
There is a lot of good content in this book and most of it is ...
By Alex
This book is....decent. I wanted to give it 3.5 stars but I can't on here. There is a lot of good content in this book and most of it is pretty clear to follow once you get into it. I also like the approach of transitioning MVC developers to Web API, although there wasn't as much comparison between the two frameworks as I would expect based on the title. I like that Freeman always explains how things work behind the scenes to some extent rather than just telling you how to do something.

I have two main complaints about this book. The first is that it uses knockout.js for most of the examples of actually sending requests to Web API services. I think it's highly unnecessary to add a whole javascript framework into the mix and adds a ton of bloat to the book. I think most of the examples could have easily been replaced with simpler calls through something like Fiddler or Postman, or even something more lightweight or wide spread like jQuery. I have no need to learn knockout at the moment, but I still had to read through a lot of knockout code to understand some of the examples.

My second complaint sort of builds off of the first - this book just has a ton of bloat in general. It's almost 700 pages long but feels like it could be about half that. The entire first section (out of three) is very slow moving and knockout/html example heavy. The second two sections of the book are much more interesting and far more useful for actually learning Web API.

I also wish the book spent a little bit more time on overall web service design concepts and how to architect solutions in a scalable way - the book is very code oriented, it would be nice if there was some more big picture content. The chapter on web services in general is only about 10 pages long.

This might sound harsh but this book is still definitely worth reading for the later 2/3rds of the book, what's there is great if you can figure out how to skim past the bloat.

1 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Helpful Content
By Mark Phillips
Not for beginning developers.
Helpful information, but at times the writing seemed a bit vague.
Apress needs to do more thorough proofreading for spelling and grammar and some Kindle reformatting