Book Image

Building an API Product

By : Bruno Pedro
Book Image

Building an API Product

By: Bruno Pedro

Overview of this book

The exponential increase in the number of APIs is evidence of their widespread adoption by companies seeking to deliver value to users across diverse industries, making the art of building successful APIs an invaluable skill for anyone involved in product development. With this comprehensive guide, you’ll walk through the entire process of planning, designing, implementing, releasing, and maintaining successful API products. You’ll start by exploring all aspects of APIs, including their types, technologies, protocols, and lifecycle stages. Next, you’ll learn how to define an API strategy and identify business objectives, user personas, and jobs-to-be-done (JTBD). With these skills, you’ll delve into designing and validating API capabilities to create a machine-readable API definition. As you advance, the book helps you understand how to choose the right language and framework for securely releasing an API server and offers insights into analyzing API usage metrics, improving performance, and creating compelling documentation that users love. Finally, you’ll discover ways to support users, manage versions, and communicate changes or the retirement of an API. By the end of this API development book, you’ll have the confidence and skills to create API products that truly stand out in the market.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
1
Part 1:The API Product
6
Part 2:Designing an API Product
11
Part 3:Implementing an API Product
16
Part 4:Releasing an API Product
20
Part 5:Maintaining an API Product

Summary

At this point, you know what it means to observe API behavior. You can identify the different metrics that are important to consider while doing API usage analysis. You also learned that while it’s important to understand user behavior, knowing what happens on your backend system is fundamental. You know how to use APM as your ally to understand how to mitigate problems even before users report them. Speaking of users, you also now know the importance of user feedback and how it can help you maintain a high-quality API product.

You started by learning all about API usage analytics, including the most important metrics to explore. You learned what time to first request is and how it reflects the user experience. You also learned about other metrics such as usage volume and patterns, number of errors, rate-limiting violations, and performance. You then got into the topic of application performance monitoring and learned how you can use it to capture metrics that are...