Principles of Web API Design

Delivering Value with APIs and Microservices

James Higginbotham author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Pearson Education (US)

Published:5th Mar '22

£33.99

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Principles of Web API Design cover

The Full-Lifecycle Guide to API Design

Principles of Web API Design brings together principles and processes to help you succeed across the entire API design lifecycle. Drawing on extensive in-the-trenches experience, leading consultant James Higginbotham helps you align every stakeholder on specific outcomes, design APIs that deliver value, and scale the design process from small teams to the entire organization.

Higginbotham helps you bring an "outside-in" perspective to API design to reflect the voices of customers and product teams, map requirements to specific and well-organized APIs, and choose the right API style for writing them. He walks through a real-world example from the ground up, offering guidance for anyone designing new APIs or extending existing APIs.

  • Deliver great APIs by getting your design processes right
  • Gain agreement on specific outcomes from design teams, customers, and other stakeholders
  • Craft job stories, conduct EventStorming, and model capabilities
  • Identify the right APIs, and organize operations into coherent API profiles
  • Choose the best styles for each project: REST, gRPC, GraphQL, or event-based async APIs
  • Refine designs based on feedback from documenters, testers, and customers
  • Decompose APIs into microservices
  • Mature your API program, implementing design and management processes that scale
This guide is invaluable for anyone involved in planning or building APIs--architects, developers, team leaders, managers in single and multi-team environments, and any technical or business professional delivering "API-as-a-product" offerings.

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"I've had the good fortune to work alongside and learn from James over the past several years. His varied institutional knowledge, along with his depth of experience and eye for practical application, makes him unique among his peers. I am ecstatic that others now have the opportunity, in this book, to benefit from James's compelling, pragmatic vision for how to make better APIs. Principles of Web API Design surveys the gamut of available techniques and sets forth a prescriptive, easy-to-follow approach. Teams that apply the guidance in this book will create APIs that better resonate with customers, deliver more business value in less time, and require fewer breaking changes. I cannot recommend Principles of Web API Design enough."
--Matthew Reinbold, Director of API Ecosystems, Postman

"In modern software development, APIs end up being both the cause of and solution to many of the problems we face. James's process for dissecting, analyzing, and designing APIs from concepts to caching creates a repeatable approach for teams to solve more problems than they create.”
--D. Keith Casey, Jr., API Problem Solver, CaseySoftware, LLC

"Following James's clear and easy-to-follow guide, in one afternoon I was able to apply his process to current real-world use cases. I now have the practical guidance, techniques, and clear examples to help me take those next vital steps. Recommended reading for anyone connected to and working with APIs."
--Joyce Stack, Architect, Elsevier

" Principles of Web API Design uncovers more than principles. In it, you'll learn a process--a method to design APIs."
--Arnaud Lauret, API Handyman

"This insightful playbook guides API teams through a structured process that fosters productive collaboration, valuable capability identification, and best-practice contract crafting. James distills years of experience into a pragmatic roadmap for defining and refining API products, and also provides a primer for API security, eventing, resiliency, and microservices alignment. A must-read for architects either new to the API discipline or responsible for onboarding new teams and instituting a structured API definition process."
--Chris Haddad, Chief Architect, Karux LLC

ISBN: 9780137355631

Dimensions: 234mm x 186mm x 18mm

Weight: 660g

368 pages