API Architecture: The Big Picture for Building APIs

API-University Series #2

by Matthias Biehl

Looking for the big picture of building APIs? This book is for you! Building APIs that consumers love should certainly be the goal of any API initiative. However, it is easier said than done. It requires getting the architecture for your APIs right. This book equips you with both foundations and best practices for API architecture. This book is for you if you want to understand the big picture of API design and development, you want to define an API architecture, establish a platform for APIs or simply want to build APIs your consumers love. This book is NOT for you, if you are looking for a step-by step guide for building APIs, focusing on every detail of the correct application of REST principles. In this case I recommend the book "API Design" of the API-University Series. What is API architecture? Architecture spans the bigger picture of APIs and can be seen from several This book covers all of the above perspectives on API architecture. However, to become useful, the architecture needs to be put into practice. This is why this book covers an API methodology for design and development. An API methodology provides practical guidelines for putting API architecture into practice. It explains how to develop an API architecture into an API that consumers love. A lot of the information on APIs is available on the web. Most of it is published by vendors of API products. I am always a bit suspicious of technical information pushed by product vendors. This book is different. In this book, a product-independent view on API architecture is presented. The API-University Series is a modular series of books on API-related topics. Each book focuses on a particular API topic, so you can select the topics within APIs, which are relevant for you.

Genres: Technology

190 pages, Paperback

First published May 21, 2015

About the author

Matthias has provided expertise to international and national companies in the areas of API strategy, API architecture, security, software engineering and software integration. At some point, he got a PhD.

Nowadays, he uses his background in technology and software engineering to help companies realize their digital transformation agendas and bring innovative software solutions to the market.

He also loves sharing his knowledge in the classroom, at workshops, and in his books. Matthias is an instructor at the API-University, publishes a blog on APIs, is the author of several books on APIs and regularly speaks at technology conferences.

Reviews

[Jascha · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was expecting something more. Reading this book is like having a coffee with someone, a lot of talking but nothing really specific. Rather tha na book, this should be some kind of blog post or aarticle on Linkedin.

[Taylor Danielewski · Rating 3 out of 5]

Didn’t really go as in depth or into the code as much as I would have liked. Expected more on best practices for the general structure of your APIs.

Concepts were pretty repetitive, and there were a handful of typos that ended up being pretty distracting.

[Сергей Польшин · Rating 3 out of 5]

Little bit outdated

Now it's little bit outdated. But however it make sense to know.
So I suggest to read only first part of book. Rest is not valid right now

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was not impressed with this book. Most of what it discussed was either common sense, or so mired in technical detail that it was hard to extract meaningful best practices from it. In addition, the editing of the English version was somewhat problematic; I was constantly reminded that this was a translation by someone without English as a first language. The colloquial sort of errors were disruptive to my reading at times. Pass.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

In general it was a decent book, but I was expecting more. I would say it was a mashup from various online sources with no extra value as a book. It can be a valuable reference book for an absolute beginner which is something that i would totally recommend actually.
I would like to read a follow up to this one with more advanced usage scenarios and examples.
As an overall, it is a worthy read and a nice introduction to REST APIs.