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Ask HN: What are good reads for designing APIs?

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Re: Ask HN: What are good reads for designing APIs?

#44

I think it depends on what type of API you'd like to design. If you're talking about REST APIs, then the best book I've come across is RESTful Web APIs by Leonard Richardson and Mike Amundsen: http://restfulwebapis.org/ It actually shows you how to do REST properly, not that shoddy knock-off REST that some people push, where you have to document all your URI structures and hard-code them in your clients. There's soli…

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I cannot recommend this book enough. Read it, read it again, take in everything it is trying to say and try as hard as you can to understand it.

There is a whole world of awesome and tragically misunderstood tools in the book.

Re: Ask HN: What are good reads for designing APIs?

#45
Though it's somewhat dated and C# oriented, the really, really fantastic Framework Design Guidelines by Brad Abrams and Krzysztof Cwalina is a thoughtful treatise on designing usable APIs. A lot of the things I read in there still resonate with me almost a decade later.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Framework-Design-Guidelines-Convent...

Re: Ask HN: What are good reads for designing APIs?

#48

This question is a little vague. My assumption is you mean a REST API. This is a must watch and encapsulates good design and theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdSrT4yjS1g Good API design, if you are trying to learn from zero, comes from learning from good examples. These are some of my favorites APIs by design + Stripe + Twilio + Slack + Stormpath (fd: I work here) There is a lot of work that goes around the AP…

+ Etsy
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