The Full-Lifecycle Guide to API Design

Principles of Web API Design brings together principles and processes to help you succeed across the entire API design lifecycle. Drawing on extensive in-the-trenches experience, leading consultant James Higginbotham helps you 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 you 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 your 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 your 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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