I love going to the theatre and I try to go often. Earlier tonight I saw a play that I particularly enjoyed.

I went to see “Breaking the code”, a play by Hugh Whitemore about Alan Turing. I loved the script and the local production in one of Seattle’s many small theaters, the Erickson.

How can a geek like me not enjoy all the references to the beginnings of the digital computer, the foundations of computer science? There was discussion of Russell’s teachings and his foundational work with Principia Mathematica, Einstein’s theories, Wittgenstein’s ideas and his interactions with Turing, and of course Turing’s ideas about computing, mechanical brains, and artificial intelligence.

The computing/mathematical concepts were represented extremely well through the script. However, the portrayal of the idiosyncratic attributes of Alan Turing’s personality seemed to always be in focus, and rightly so. I am really glad there was major emphasis on the mistreatment of Alan Turing by the British state due to his sexuality. In case you haven’t heard, the British government offered an official apology just last year.

Well done to the entire crew and thanks to Mary for the ticket :-)

Few interesting things happened today:

• I received my copy of “REST in Practice”. It wasn’t as a big moment as when my PhD thesis was printed (despite Jim’s attempts to stress me out at the final moment with his “tick tock tick” soundtrack) but it was still quite a significant one. It felt great to finally see the end result of our work that spanned 3 years.
• I talked to someone in Microsoft that I greatly respect and admire. I was very much encouraged by his reaction to my ideas, thinking, and approach/plans for the future.
• I stopped for Chinese food on the way to pick up friends from the airport. Fortune cookie: “Fame and fortune is coming your way” :-) I don’t believe in fortune cookies but this particular one nicely matched my wishful thinking, especially when combined with the discussions of the day :-)

Now back to the real world!

As we announced last week, we are going to be giving away free copies of “REST in Practice” as a way of celebrating its September 24th release. After this post, every entry in the #RESTinPractice tweet stream will be saved for a period of few weeks. Every 3-4 days we’ll be drawing a random tweet entry for one of the free 10 eBooks.* We’ll be announcing the winner through the same tweet stream, including their twitter handle of course.

All you have to do is help spread the word about “REST in Practice” by (re-)tweeting the link to the book’s Amazon page and/or http://restinpractice.com. Of course, you have to include the #RESTinPractice twitter tag so that you enter the draw. Here’s a suggestion but feel free to improvise/be more creative:

Looking fwd to reading “REST in Practice”: http://restinpractice.com. Find it at Amazon: http://amzn.to/amm14L. #RESTinPractice

You can enter the draw more than once in order to increase your chances (but not more than once per day please). If your twitter handle is jimwebber, iansrobinson, or savasp your tweets won’t be considered for the draw :-))) Please note that your twitter stream must be public for your entry to appear in the #RESTinPractice stream.

Good luck everyone and let us know what you think!!!

* We decided to make all eBooks available for the Twitter draw. As it was pointed out to us, one needed to have purchased and read the book before sending a quote for the book’s guestbook and then entering the draw for one of the free eBook copies :-)

With the release of “REST in Practice” only a couple of weeks away, we asked O’Reilly to let us give few copies away :-) We just love giving things away :-)

So, here’s what to expect:

• Jim and Ian are always busy with traveling around the globe talking about REST, enterprise integration, SOA, Web Services, and so on. So, we thought of making their traveling more difficult by giving them 2 printed copies of “REST in Practice” to carry :-) Make sure you follow their blogs and twitter streams for announcements on where they are going to be next. Starting from October, they will be making sure that they don’t have to return back to their bases with the books in their hands. So, attend their talks for a chance to get one of the copies.
• We will soon announce a draw for eBook copies. We will ask people to tweet a link to Amazon’s page of “REST in Practice” together with the #RESTinPractice tag. We will be giving away 2 eBooks per week for 4 weeks by randomly selecting an entry from the #RESTinPractice twitter stream. We’ll advise you on the start date of the draw.*
• Once you get the chance to read “REST in Practice”, we will ask you to send us your thoughts (good or bad). Your name will be automatically entered into a list. We are going to draw 2 names over a period of few weeks or months. The winners will receive a free eBook copy. Your thoughts will also make it to our guest book.

* Of course, feel free to start twitting about the book now :-) We know that you’d be more than happy to tweet again when the time comes :-)

A couple of days ago, O’Reilly sent “REST in Practice” to the (e-)printers*. It was a great milestone for Jim, Ian, and me; the end of a long road. The target date for the book’s release date is September 24th (yes, of this year :-)

Over the last couple of years, Ian and Jim have been very busy going around conferences and giving talks that were related to the book’s topic. In fact, their slideware heavily drew from the content and structure of “REST in Practice”. They did an excellent job at aggregating their work into a single story that can be used as the basis of an entire University course. In fact, we’ve already been approached by few professors who expressed their interest in doing just that. In fact, we are aware of one instance where the book has been added as the recommended textboox even before its release :-) We are very honored and we are going to do our best to support the academic community. As an indication of our willingness to help, we are making available the entire set of “REST in Practice” slides to any academic who would like to make use of it (trust me, it’s a substantial set).

Jim has already written a similar post with more details. Please feel free to contact me, Jim, or Ian, in order to get free access to the material. We only ask that you consider adding “REST in Practice” as one of the recommended texts for the course you are running.

And now for something completely different** :-)

As many of you might already know, we were very lucky to have had many eyes looking over our shoulders as were putting the book together. Our wonderful reviewers gave us a lot of feedback. There were others who gave us invaluable advice throughout the years. We thank everyone!

Well, we asked some of them for quotes that we could perhaps include in the back cover of our book. Here’s what they had to say:

"I laughed, I cried. Better than Cats!"

"Finally! Nobody would have believed it, but they've actually finished the damn thing!"

“Bloody REST-afarian SOAP-dodging hippies!”

"This is what Tim Bray must have meant when he wrote about 'diving into hypertext casuistry'"

:-))) (of course, we got some quotes we could actually use :-)

I am not going to reveal the people behind these quotes. However, they will appear soon on the book’s website. I strongly encourage you to send us your feedback and a quote (hopefully a nice one but we accept all types :-) once you’ve read the book.

* Yes, we were told that eBook versions of the book will also be available.

** It’s a Monty Python reference :-)