JSON at Work: Practical Data Integration for the Web

by Tom Marrs

JSON is becoming the backbone for meaningful data interchange over the internet. This format is now supported by an entire ecosystem of standards, tools, and technologies for building truly elegant, useful, and efficient applications. With this hands-on guide, author and architect Tom Marrs shows you how to build enterprise-class applications and services by leveraging JSON tooling and message/document design.

JSON at Work provides application architects and developers with guidelines, best practices, and use cases, along with lots of real-world examples and code samples. You’ll start with a comprehensive JSON overview, explore the JSON ecosystem, and then dive into JSON’s use in the enterprise.

Get acquainted with JSON basics and learn how to model JSON data Learn how to use JSON with Node.js, Ruby on Rails, and Java Structure JSON documents with JSON Schema to design and test APIs Search the contents of JSON documents with JSON Search tools Convert JSON documents to other data formats with JSON Transform tools Compare JSON-based hypermedia formats, including HAL and jsonapi Leverage MongoDB to store and access JSON documents Use Apache Kafka to exchange JSON-based messages between services

Genres: Computer Science, Web, Nonfiction, Technology

551 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 19, 2017

Reviews

[Lucy Batson]

I can't imagine needing a whole book to grok JSON, and I don't think your time is well spent reading this one.

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

Json at Work is an unfocused but easy-to-digest scattershot look at JSON, especially as it relates to web APIs.

Much of this book feels like it could (perhaps even should) be a Medium post. Several pages are dedicated to writing out various unit tests, while commands are packed tightly into pictures of terminals, and only written out half the time. When they ARE written out, the author always explains them in detail, but sometimes the picture is just too small to read easily.

The information on JSON schema was relevant and useful, while some of the other topics are only tangentially related to JSON. This could have been an incredibly focused book at half the length, but as it stands I fear various technologies will fall out of vogue, rendering this book into a hodgepodge of current and outdated tools.

Technologies include Kafka, Ruby on Rails, MailCatcher, Handlebars, Mustache, and more. The author is clearly knowledgeable on these topics, and writes clearly. Overall, I can't really recommend this book in its current scope.

[Peter Aronson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book strikes me more like a really long blog post or a runaway Stack Exchange answer than what I actually think of as a technical book. One of my co-workers once asked me in surprise why I still bought computer books when you could look up everything you need on the internet (or Internet if you prefer). What I told him was that a book could delve deeper into the material, could go into history, could explain why instead of just how or what. This book does very little of that, with the exception of some material in the Hypermedia chapter. Instead it is all about the current tools, the current libraries (but only in the author's favorite languages, only the operating systems the author likes). As a result, in two years this book will be showing its age, in five at least half of what is in it will be useless, and in eight years it will be only good to put under the short leg of a table. And I may being being optimistic. But it's a really good blog post at least.

[Joshua]

Disappointed by how the book worked through JSON, as it was not at all what I expected. It is, however, practical, and I intend to return to this book when I have a better understanding of JSON and am ready to work through the examples. Particularly useful is the idea of a mock/stub API; I look forward to working with those.

[Jose Seco Sanz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book does actually have good content, but it was honestly boring to me, but I think it contains some bits of information that are not shown in other books. Also examples are in javascript, which I don't like that much.