Book
The Design of Web APIs
Arnaud Lauret
Summary
Arnaud Lauret, who blogs as the API Handyman after ten years designing APIs in banking, argues that API design is a distinct skill separate from whichever technology builds the API, whether REST, GraphQL, or gRPC. The book starts from gathering requirements and adopting a consumer-first mindset, then works through programming interface design, OpenAPI description formats, simplicity, predictability, and security, before turning to versioning, pagination, and documentation for APIs already in production. Its many small, concrete examples focus on the design decisions consumers actually feel, not the protocol underneath them.
Target Readers
- Backend developers who can implement REST endpoints but haven't yet reasoned explicitly about consumer-first API design
- Teams adopting OpenAPI as a schema-first workflow who want the design principles behind the specification, not just its syntax
- API designers responsible for versioning and evolving a production API without breaking existing consumers
Tags
Colophon
- Publisher
- Shoeisha
- ISBN
- 978-4798167015
- Published
- Aug 2020
- List price
- ¥4,180incl. taxMay differ from the actual selling price on Amazon
Get this book
* The link above is an advertisement via Amazon Associates.Related Books
Prerequisites
- Recommended
Web API: The Good Parts
Takaaki Mizuno
Reason: Once you've grasped the basics of REST design, you advance to describing and sharing an API as a 'contract.' The Design of Web APIs presents a spec-driven design process with OpenAPI, giving you a repeatable way to build consistent APIs across a team.
- Related
Web o Sasaeru Gijutsu (The Technology That Supports the Web)
HTTP, URI, HTML, and REST
Yohei Yamamoto
Reason: With the Web's foundations understood, you advance to viewing API creation as a systematic design process. The Design of Web APIs connects user-centered API design with description via OpenAPI, showing how to design APIs as a methodology rather than by improvisation.
Next Books
- Recommended
Secure APIs
Design, build, and implement
José Haro Peralta
Reason: Having grasped the practice of API design—contract-first with OpenAPI, pagination, versioning—you start to see the next challenge: how to build security into that design. Secure APIs builds up a shift-left perspective, addressing authentication/authorization vulnerabilities and API configuration risks starting from the design stage.
- Related
Learning GraphQL
Declarative Data Fetching for Modern Web Apps
Eve Porcello, Alex Banks
Reason: Having experienced design-driven REST described with OpenAPI, you compare GraphQL, which realizes the same 'schema-first' idea in a different shape. The shared emphasis on designing APIs around a typed schema—and the difference in query models—deepens your understanding.
- Related
gRPC: Up and Running
Building Cloud Native Applications with Go and Java for Docker and Kubernetes
Kasun Indrasiri, Danesh Kuruppu
Reason: Comfortable with contract design via OpenAPI, you move to gRPC, which uses Protocol Buffers as a stricter, binary-efficient contract. Comparing the experience of generating types and stubs from a schema reveals the breadth of contract-driven development.
- Related
Testing Web APIs
Mark Winteringham
Reason: Once you can design an API, you need a way to verify that the design keeps working as promised. Testing Web APIs introduces contract testing, letting you catch mismatches between provider and consumer in CI.