Learning REST: Multiple routes to the same resource?

I just started looking at REST, and am working on a simple app made up from Authors and Books with an Author has_many :books relationship.

I'm thinking the following resources make sense:

/books books/book_id /books/book_id/author /authors /authors/author_id /authors/author_id/books

I.e. listing books, listing authors, looking up a book or author, listing books for a certain author, and accessing the author of some specific book.

Is this reasonable, or am I already doing something wrong? I'm guessing that /books/book_id/author may be a little over the top.

As for routes, I now have the following:

  map.resources :books do |book|     book.resource :author   end   map.resources :authors do |author|     author.resources :books   end

According to rake routes, there's a fair amount of controller+action duplication here. Is this ok, should I be looking at parameters to figure out what to do?

Here's the index action from my books controller right now. This one isn't too messy, but I'm sure other actions will turn out worse..?

  # GET /books[.xml]   # GET /authors/author_id/books[.xml]   def index     if params[:author_id].nil?       @books = Book.find(:all)     else       @books = Author.find(params[:author_id]).books     end

    respond_to do |format|       format.html # index.html.erb       format.xml { render :xml => @books }     end   end

TBH I'm a little lost, and should probably be looking for books or something. Recommendations appreciated.

Thank you, Isak

try this one, lots of ruby examples <http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529260/&gt;

and this

<http://peepcode.com/products/restful-rails&gt;