Your API Is Bad
Your API Is Bad
(And You Should Feel Bad)
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
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.
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