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.
About the Contributors

Founder, Player FM
Table of Contents
- 1 Acknowledgements
- 2 Foreword
- 3 Introduction
- 4 Anatomy of an API
- 5 URLs
- 6 Requests and Responses
- 7 Errors
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.
The Leanpub 45-day 100% Happiness Guarantee
Within 45 days of purchase you can get a 100% refund on any Leanpub purchase, in two clicks.
See full terms...