4 Best Books to Learn Web Service in Java - SOAP and RESTful

If you are a Java developer and want to learn how to develop Web Services in Java, both SOAP and RESTful, but confused about where to start, then you have come to the right place. In this article, I am going to share some of the best books to learn about both SOAP and RESTful web services in Java. If you are not familiar with Web Services, it's a way to expose the services provided by your application to other developers and applications. For example, if your system offers weather information, then the user can go and check whether manually by looking at the Web GUI built using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Still, by exposing the same information using Web services, you allow a programmer to display as they want.
A programmer can invoke your web service from a smartphone application and show weather-related information in a weather app. The web service really makes your services more accessible and opens a new way to show the information to different users.

There are two kinds of Web Services popular in the programming world, SOAP web services and RESTful Web services. Former is the old but reliable way to exchange messages and provides a lot of features, e.g., asynchronous processing and stateful transaction, while REST is a relatively newer way to build Web service, which makes use of HTTP protocol to expose Web Services.

Java provides support to develop both SOAP and RESTful Web services. It has both standard and several libraries and frameworks, which makes your task of developing web services really easy like you can use JAX-WS to improve SOAP-based Web Services and JAX-RS to create RESTful Web Services.

Several open-source implementations exist like Apache Axis is an excellent library for developing SOAP-based web services and Restlet, RESTEasy, Jersey, and Spring frameworks are suitable for developing RESTful web Services.

4 Best Books to Learn Web Services in Java

I have always found books and personal coaching, the best way to learn anything new in the past. When it comes to self-study, I mostly rely on good books. Why do I prefer books to documentation or blog posts?

Well, even though documentation is the most up-to-date and comprehensive resource, they are not for beginners. They are reference material, so they are the best to use as a reference, i.e., you refer them once you have some knowledge.

Similarly, a blog post is good to learn a particular topic, but they are not comprehensive enough to teach you most of the things you need to use that knowledge in real-world projects, hence I use blog posts when I want to learn more about a particular topic like if you are familiar with PUT and POST method but confused about when to use PUT or POST, you can search and read more about it in an article primarily focused on that.

Books provide the best of both worlds. They contain all the useful information in a structured fashion so that you can learn them in order, starting from fundamentals and going to advanced knowledge. They are also most complete and just comprehensive enough to give you some sort of platform where you can use reference documentation and blog posts to learn more about it.


So, without wasting any more time, let's see some of the best books to learn web services in Java.

1. Java Web Services: Up and Running by Martin Kalin 

This should be the first book you read to get a hand at what is soap and rest web services, what can you do with them, and how to implement them with JAX-WS and JAX-RS. If you are entirely new to this topic, I recommend writing some of the code examples the book gives, and if you already have some knowledge, you can just go through the book skipping the parts that you consider you already know well enough.

The second edition provides you more RESTful context than the first version as REST has come a long way in recent years to become the first choice web service technology. This is also an excellent book to prepare for Oracle Certified Java expert for Web services (OCEJWSD) certification, exam code 1Z0-897.

You can also see REST Java Web Services by Udemy to learn about Web Services in Java. It's an excellent course to combine with this book.

2. RESTful Java with JAX-RS 2.0 by Bill Burke 

If you have some knowledge of Java and OOP and you want to learn how to developer REST based clients and servers, then this is the right book for you. It covered JAX-RS 2.0 specification from Java EE 7 and focused on implementation rather than theory.

You will learn how REST and JAX-RS work together and when to use them. It uses JBoss' RESTEasy framework to demonstrate JAX-RS 2.0 features with several hands-on examples.

It also teaches you a little bit of advanced concepts like securing REST and popular mechanisms to perform authentication on the Web, including client-side SSL and OAuth 2.0 and HTTP Content Negotiation, caching, etc.

It's actually a complete guide to developing REST web services using the Java platform, particularly JAX-RS 2.0, useful for both beginners and experienced. Alternatively, if you want to use Jersey, then you can check RESTFul Services in Java using the Jersey course on Udemy. It's a very hands-on course to develop the REST application in Java using Jersey.

3. RESTful Web Services by Leonard Richardson 

This is actually the best book on RESTful Web Services, collectively authored by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby. Unlike the previous book, which is a guide to implementing REST web services in Java using JAX-RS 2.0, this is the guide for RESTful web services itself.

Even David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of the Rails framework, who has also forward this book, has said that "Every developer working with the Web needs to read this book." and I couldn't agree more.

You will learn every single detail about web services and that too from the web perspective. You will learn what URI is, how HTTP can be used as an application-level protocol, and not just a transport protocol to transfer data between client and server.

You will also learn Resource oriented architecture and, most importantly, how a RESTFul design is more straightforward, more versatile, and more scalable than an RPC based web service design. In short, a great book to learn everything about REST web services from a web developer perspective.

4. Spring REST

This book explains all the details of developing RESTful web services using Spring Framework. For example, Spring provides RestTemplate to only the consumption of RESTful web services. You can connect to a REST service using this class and process response in JSON, XML, and TEXT format. Spring framework is full of such helpful classes and utilities.

If you want to use Spring for creating RESTful APIs, I also suggest you take a look at REST with Spring by Eugen Paraschiv, it's one of the best resources for Java developers.

That's all in this list of great books to learn web services in Java. It includes papers on both SOAP and RESTful web services. The knowledge of SOAP and REST web services will give you a big plus in your resume because not many developers know how web services actually work or how to apply best practices, be it SOAP or REST. Since the current trend is towards RESTful web services, learning a little bit more about REST is even more beneficial.


Other Resources for Experienced Java Developers you may like to explore

• 5 Courses to learn RESTful WebServices in Java
• 5 Free Spring  Framework Courses for Java Developers
• 5 Courses to Learn Hibernate and JPA
• Top 5 Java design patterns courses for experienced Java devs
• 5 Free courses to Learn React Framework
• 5 Courses to Learn Big Data and Apache Spark
• 5 Courses to Learn Node.js for Java developers
• Top 5 Selenium with Java Web Driver Courses
• 5 Free Angular Courses for Java Programmers
• 5 Courses to Learn Web Development  from scratch
• 5 Courses to learn Spring Boot in depth
• Top 5 Courses to learn Microservice in Java 

Thanks a lot for reading this article so far. If you like these books to learn REST and RESTful Web Services in Java, then please share them with your friends and colleagues. If you have any questions or feedback, then please drop a note.

P. S. - If you are looking to start developing RESTful web services in Java but looking for a free online course, to begin with, I suggest you check RESTful Web Services with Spring Framework Course on Udemy. It's completely free, all you need to do is create an Udemy account if you don't have one and join this course.