APIs are transforming the business world at an increasing pace. Gain the essential skills needed to quickly design, build, and deploy quality web APIs that are robust, reliable, and resilient. Go from initial design through prototyping and implementation to deployment of mission-critical APIs for your organization. Test, secure, and deploy your API with confidence and avoid the "release into production" panic. Tackle just about any API challenge with more than a dozen open-source utilities and common programming patterns you can apply right away.
 

Good API design means starting with the API-First principle - understanding who is using the API and what they want to do with it - and applying basic design skills to match customers' needs while solving business-critical problems. Use the Sketch-Design-Build method to create reliable and scalable web APIs quickly and easily without a lot of risk to the day-to-day business operations. Create clear sequence diagrams, accurate specifications, and machine-readable API descriptions all reviewed, tested, and ready to turn into fully-functional NodeJS code.
 

Create reliable test collections with Postman and implement proper identity and access control security with AuthO-without added cost or risk to the company. Deploy all of this to Heroku using a continuous delivery approach that pushes secure, well-tested code to your public servers ready for use by both internal and external developers.
 

From design to code to test to deployment, unlock hidden business value and release stable and scalable web APIs that meet customer needs and solve important business problems in a consistent and reliable manner.
 

Welcome to the world of API development! This book is designed to help you go from start to finish on the path to designing, building, and deploying great application programming interfaces (APIs) for the web. Along the way you’ll learn a handful of important practices and principles that will help you design and build APIs that are robust, reliable, and resilient. You’ll also acquire skills in a wide range of developer tools, including tools for design, documentation, building, testing, security, and deployment. By the time you work through this book, you should have enough experience to tackle just about any challenge that comes your way.

Who Should Read This Book

This book is aimed at software developers and designers looking to quickly get up to speed on how to design and build web APIs. Since the content is based on training material I’ve used over the years, this book could be handy should you put together your own API training course for your team or company.
 

It can also be used as a general reference guide on basic topics like API design methods, the API build process, testing, and other steps in API development. For this reason, the book is also valuable to senior software architects and API product managers looking to provide common guidance to all their teams.

Your API Journey
 

The content in this book follows a learning path I’ve developed over the years to help developers from varying backgrounds get a foothold and gain experience in the API space.
 

While the book takes a very linear approach to all this (driving from modeling to building to releasing the API), in reality API development involves lots of iteration and bouncing back and forth between skills along the way. In most production work, you end up working in a series of “loops” that allow you to model, then design, then go back and fix the model a bit, and then design some more, and so on until you finally get to the point where your API is ready to be released to the cloud.
 

While this looping is the right way to do the work, it isn’t a good way to write a book about it. For that reason, we’ll stick to our straight-line approach from start to finish, with lots of reminders along the way about iteration and looping as a key element in designing and building great APIs.

What’s Covered (And What’s Not)
 

The goal of this book is to give you comprehensive “front-to-back” coverage of what’s needed to get a new API up and running in production. To keep things focused, we’ll be covering the skills needed to create “RESTful” APIs. These are HTTP-based APIs that rely on the common request-response style used by the vast majority of APIs on the web today. There are other important API styles (such as gRPC and graphQL) that we won’t have time to cover in a single book. The good news is that most other API styles rely on the HTTP-based web API approach we’ll cover here. Getting a solid understanding of this RESTful style will come in handy if you want to explore other styles in the future.
 

The topic of APIs for the web is quite large, and we won’t be able to cover it all. This book focuses on a series of steps centered around the external interfaces (the APIs) used to access back-end services. However, I won’t be getting into how to build and deploy back-end services (sometimes called microservices) themselves. If you’re interested in that topic, I recommend you check out Chris Richardson’s Microservices Patterns or Sam Newman’s Building Microservices. I also won’t be covering the details of writing the client applications that consume web APIs. If you’re looking for a source on that, I suggest you check out another of my books, RESTful Web Clients. Finally, I won’t be covering topics related to the broader topic of API management. Things like API gateways, portals, monitoring, and overall governance are covered well in books like Continuous API Management, which I co-wrote with Mehdi Medjaoui, Erik Wilde, and Ronnie Mitra.