The Full-Lifecycle Guide to API Design

Principles of Web API Design brings together principles and processes to help students succeed across the entire API design lifecycle. Drawing on extensive in-the-trenches experience, leading consultant James Higginbotham helps students align every stakeholder on specific outcomes, design APIs that deliver value, and scale the design process from small teams to the entire organization.

Higginbotham helps students bring an "outside-in" perspective to API design to reflect the voices of customers and product teams, map requirements to specific and well-organized APIs, and choose the right API style for writing them. He walks through a real-world example from the ground up, offering guidance for anyone designing new APIs or extending existing APIs.

• Deliver great APIs by getting students'' design processes right
• Gain agreement on specific outcomes from design teams, customers, and other stakeholders
• Craft job stories, conduct EventStorming, and model capabilities
• Identify the right APIs, and organize operations into coherent API profiles
• Choose the best styles for each project: REST, gRPC, GraphQL, or event-based async APIs
• Refine designs based on feedback from documenters, testers, and customers
• Decompose APIs into microservices
• Mature students'' API program, implementing design and management processes that scale

This guide is invaluable for anyone involved in planning or building APIs—architects, developers, team leaders, managers in single and multi-team environments, and any technical or business professional delivering "API-as-a-product" offerings.

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