The Design of Web APIs

Lauret writes about API design from the consumer's point of view, treating an API as a user interface for developers. The book starts by identifying the goals an API needs to support, then covers designing the resources, actions and data representations, and choosing a representation layer such as REST over HTTP. Later parts deal with contextual design, including error handling, pagination, versioning and evolving an interface without breaking existing clients, along with security, network efficiency and documentation. A closing section covers growing an API design practice with guidelines and design reviews. Readable without deep engineering knowledge, which makes it useful to a product manager on a platform team.