The Web API Design Guidelines for Happy Developers
Free!
With Membership
$7.99
Minimum paid price

The Web API Design Guidelines for Happy Developers

A short pragmatic guide to build effective and funny Web APIs

About the Book

When developing a modern Web Application, it’s increasingly likely that you, as a developer, will need to use an API: be it a social network plugin API, an e-commerce checkout API, a Captcha, a Web Analytics suite. In today’s Web development APIs are ubiquitous.

But as you wandered through dozens of different APIs, you’ve certainly found out already that they’re not all born equal: for each API that is well thought, well documented, easy to understand and fun to use, there are dozens that are obscure and inconsistent, error-prone and tedious.

The goal of this ebook is to provide a set of guidelines through key points/tips on how to design Web APIs that are, at the same time: nice and sound, fun to use and logically consistent. We don’t like to call them REST, as we don’t want to introduce unneeded constraints in our guidelines. We prefer to call them Pragmatic Web APIs

About the Authors

Antonio Pintus
Antonio Pintus

Senior Software Engineer at Vivocha.

Co-founder and CTO of the Internet of Things company named Paraimpu.

Past experiences: 16+ years of experience as Technologist in the ICT Department at CRS4, where he contributed to national and international funded research projects.

His main activities and skills are in design and development of scalable Web software systems and APIs, including Internet of Things applications. He is author and co-author of several publications and scientific papers presented in national and international conferences.

He loves APIs, Javascript and Node.js. Amateur photographer and design lover.

Federico Pinna
Federico Pinna

Having written his first computer program at the age of nine, he's being developing software for over thirty years.

Co-founder and CTO of Vivocha, a startup providing a cloud based Online Engagement Platform to medium and large enterprises.

Over the past twenty years he's designed and developed countless protocol stacks and APIs, ranging from Voice Over IP and Computer Telephony Integration systems, to, more recently, secure instant messaging and WebRTC middlewares.

In 2007, he's awarded an international patent as the inventor of iSMIL, a real-time video editing system.

He loves programming languages and wandering off the beaten track to find new solutions.

Music lover, lifelong gamer.

Table of Contents

  • Introduction
  • About the Authors
  • Documentation
  • Resource Names and URL Design
  • API Base URL and Versioning
  • HTTP Methods
    • Create with POST
    • Read with GET
    • Update with PUT
    • Delete with… DELETE
    • Limitations of HTTP PUT e DELETE
    • Caching
    • Rate Limiting
  • Actions
  • Errors and Statuses in Responses
  • Data Formats
    • Dates and Time
  • Querying Resources
    • Pagination
    • Partial Responses
  • Security
    • Authentication and Authorization
  • Browser Same Origin Policy
  • Software Development Kits
  • Conclusions
  • And… one more tip
  • References

The Leanpub 60 Day 100% Happiness Guarantee

Within 60 days of purchase you can get a 100% refund on any Leanpub purchase, in two clicks.

Now, this is technically risky for us, since you'll have the book or course files either way. But we're so confident in our products and services, and in our authors and readers, that we're happy to offer a full money back guarantee for everything we sell.

You can only find out how good something is by trying it, and because of our 100% money back guarantee there's literally no risk to do so!

So, there's no reason not to click the Add to Cart button, is there?

See full terms...

Earn $8 on a $10 Purchase, and $16 on a $20 Purchase

We pay 80% royalties on purchases of $7.99 or more, and 80% royalties minus a 50 cent flat fee on purchases between $0.99 and $7.98. You earn $8 on a $10 sale, and $16 on a $20 sale. So, if we sell 5000 non-refunded copies of your book for $20, you'll earn $80,000.

(Yes, some authors have already earned much more than that on Leanpub.)

In fact, authors have earnedover $13 millionwriting, publishing and selling on Leanpub.

Learn more about writing on Leanpub

Free Updates. DRM Free.

If you buy a Leanpub book, you get free updates for as long as the author updates the book! Many authors use Leanpub to publish their books in-progress, while they are writing them. All readers get free updates, regardless of when they bought the book or how much they paid (including free).

Most Leanpub books are available in PDF (for computers) and EPUB (for phones, tablets and Kindle). The formats that a book includes are shown at the top right corner of this page.

Finally, Leanpub books don't have any DRM copy-protection nonsense, so you can easily read them on any supported device.

Learn more about Leanpub's ebook formats and where to read them

Write and Publish on Leanpub

You can use Leanpub to easily write, publish and sell in-progress and completed ebooks and online courses!

Leanpub is a powerful platform for serious authors, combining a simple, elegant writing and publishing workflow with a store focused on selling in-progress ebooks.

Leanpub is a magical typewriter for authors: just write in plain text, and to publish your ebook, just click a button. (Or, if you are producing your ebook your own way, you can even upload your own PDF and/or EPUB files and then publish with one click!) It really is that easy.

Learn more about writing on Leanpub