API development is becoming increasingly common for server-side developers thanks to the rise of front-end JavaScript frameworks, iPhone applications, and API-centric architectures. It might seem like grabbing stuff from a data source and shoving it out as JSON would be easy, but surviving changes in business logic, database schema updates, new features, or deprecated endpoints can be a nightmare.

After finding many of the existing resources for API development to be lacking, Phil learned a lot of things the hard way through years of trial and error. This book aims to condense that experience, taking examples and explanations further than the trivial apples and pears nonsense tutorials often provide.

Phil worked primarily as an API developer for the last three years. One horror was managing an API built in FuelPHP by a freelancer at the million dollar startup he joined. It was utilizing a then deprecated ORM which had been hacked to death by the previous developer, so took the time to delete that mess and build the next version in Laravel, leveraging it's simple routing, database migrations, schema, seeding, etc. When the following major version of the API was built no rewrite was required, and both managed to live side-by-side on the same "API" servers.

By passing on some best practices and general good advice you can hit the ground running with API development, combined with some horror stories and how they were overcome/avoided/averted. This book will discuss the theory of designing and building APIs in any language or framework, with this theory applied in PHP-based examples.

Some of the more advanced topics covered here are endpoint testing, embedding data objects in a consistent and scalable manner, paginating responses (including embedded objects) and hypermedia "HATEOAS" controls.

Stop playing sysadmin and get back to coding. You didn't sign up to put out fires and figuring out how to scale MySQL isn't exactly going to ship features any faster. You know that learning the intricaces of my.cnf is a waste of time, but you don't have another choice. In the book, you'll get a crash-course on every important tuning option, why it matters, and a quick formula to figure out the perfect settings for your hardware. Bliss.

You've heard alot about Nginx and horizontal scaling, and there're thousands of tutorials out there, but the quality ranges from abysmal to "this must be a joke", and when you finally find a good one, it's usually for Rails. I know what it's like to scramble around, reading bad advice on StackOverflow, copy-and-pasting config files from some message board hope that one of them finally works... pulling at your hair, swearing at the screen.

What if it didn't have to be this way? What if there was a single, high-quality resource of information on scaling PHP, on doing things the right way, that actually focused on PHP and not Rails, Node.js or the flavor of the week? Something that taught you scalable architecture and things you might run into when your only user isn't your mom?

Okay, okay- nothing will ever be as catchy as LAMP ;-)

You'll master a new, more scalable stack called LHNMPRR (Linux, HAProxy, Nginx, MySQL, PHP, Redis, & Resque) that can scale just by throwing more hardware at. You'll be able to finally get your setup to be perfect, all while using a battle tested stack that's been proven to handle billions of requests.

You'll also see the exact configurations and technologies that were used and proven at massive scale— 22 billion HTTP requests per month, thousands of MySQL queries per second— basically a metric-truck ton of visitors.