The API: 3rd Edition

API-first development is one of the hottest technical topics nowadays since many companies started to realize that API serves as a multiplier to their opportunities—but it also amplifies the design mistakes as well.
This book is written to share the expertise and describe the best practices in designing and developing APIs. It comprises six sections dedicated to:

• The API design
• API patterns
• Backwards compatibility
• HTTP API & REST
• SDKs and UI libraries
• API product management

We will discuss such concepts as:

• API-first development
• Semantic versioning
• Separating abstraction layers
• Synchronization strategies, optimistic concurrency control, and eventual consistency in APIs
• Bidirectional data flows, push and poll models
• Strong and weak coupling of API entities
• The REST architectural style compared to modern RPC frameworks such as gRPC and GraphQL
• Components of an HTTP request and their semantics
• Designing a URL nomenclature and CRUD operations
• MVC, MVP, and other approaches to decomposing UI components
• API business models
• Identifying Users and Preventing Fraud
• etc.

This book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 license. Source code might be found at github.com/twirl/The-API-Book