Your API Is Bad
This book is 70% complete
Last updated on 2014-06-21
About the Book
Your API Is Bad (and You Should Feel Bad) is a collection of mistakes that people make in their APIs. With the ascendancy of APIs, this is really starting to hurt. This book is not designed to instruct you on writing a good API; only experience and well-reasoned thought about your specific API can do that. Instead, the book aims to steer you away from writing a bad API. It's a tour of poorly-considered decisions that exist in many popular APIs, the shortcomings of those decisions, and thoughts about better ways to do things.
The inspiration for this book came about as I was writing yet another client library for yet another service, and found (yet again) that the service returned no useful, machine-readable information in error messages. All the error messages told my code was "Your request was bad and you should feel bad."
This book is my response: "Your API is bad and you should feel bad."
Let's stop feeling bad about our APIs.
License
About the Author
When he started writing this book, Paddy was a Developer Experience Engineer for an online service provider, where he worked to make their API easy to use and their developer experience pleasant. In his role, he worked with APIs quite a bit, but also ended up implementing lots of client libraries in a plethora of languages. Now he's a software engineer, and he's still fascinated by APIs.
When he's not doing that, he's writing client libraries and APIs for his own little company, Second Bit, to power mobile applications used by thousands of people around the world. Because, y'know, that's fun.
His core talents are pretending to know what he's doing and being confused about why people take him seriously.
About the Contributors
Founder, Player FM
Causes Supported
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Defending your civil liberties in a digital world.
https://www.eff.org/Based in San Francisco, EFF is a donor-supported membership organization working to protect fundamental rights regardless of technology.
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