Web-based REST and Hypermedia services are becoming more common every day, but very few client libraries take advantage of these powerful API features-mostly because the techniques and patterns needed to create successful hypermedia clients have been ignored. Yet, when done right, hypermedia-based client applications exhibit more stability and flexibility than typical one-off custom client code.This practical book takes you on a journey from custom bespoke implementations to powerful general-purpose client applications and, along the way, shows how you can harness many of the basic principles that underpin the Web. Along with a focus on applications designed for human use, this book also includes extensive examples of machine-to-machine hypermedia clients of various kinds from simple link bots to reliable web agents that can recognize and act on key metadata supplied by hypermedia APIs.