I have recently picked up a book called “RESTful Java with JAX-RS 2.0” by Bill Burke, published in 2013 (ISBN: 978-1-449-36134-1).
The book starts out with an introduction to REST. The author claims to have a CORBA background. Throughout the book, he uses this to clarify how object-oriented concepts map to REST concepts if at all. I believe that this is valuable for Java programmers even to this day. Unfortunately, the introduction to REST seems to be struggling to address its target audience. It spends time re-explaining parts of HTTP. But not enough of it is explained that it would be truly useful to someone who comes from a background of not understanding HTTP. Admittedly, such types are vanishingly rare these days, but it still feels rushed.
Due to historical developments in the Jakarta EE (then Java EE) ecosystem, a significant amount of time is spent explaining SOAP in terms of XML instead of JSON. This makes sense when migrating from SOAP to REST. It does seem, however, to be a questionable assumption whether JSON is truly so foreign that significant portions. I'm not sure if it's likely that someone will want to migrate an existing XML/SOAP solution to an XML/REST solution with a JAX-RS book. That kind of churn should be avoided in the enterprise world wherever possible.
I mentioned before that the book seems rushed. The impression of being rushed continues in every part of the book. It is definitely more of an introduction than a reference, despite weighing in at over 350 pages. A significant part of that are code dumps. This seems, but when reading K&R, I never felt like the code interrupted the flow of the text as it does here. Perhaps that is more of a testament to how talented Brian Kernighan is as a writer, but I digress.
5/10, you can read it, but it's a bad book about a dead technology.