What this book covers
Chapter 1, What Are APIs?, introduces you to API fundamentals, origins, and types such as REST, gRPC, AMQP, and MQTT.
Chapter 2, API User Experience, explores how the API user experience is vital, second-degree experience, and the impact of friction on success.
Chapter 3, API as a Product, outlines an API as a standalone product, emphasizing business value, monetization options, support, documentation, and crucial security.
Chapter 4, API Life Cycle, provides an overview of the API life cycle stages, covering design, implementation, release, and maintenance, offering an opinionated approach to API product management.
Chapter 5, Elements of API Product Design, introduces you to the key API product design stages, connecting ideation, strategy, definition, validation, and specification, paving the way for an in-depth exploration.
Chapter 6, Identifying an API Strategy, analyses the strategy stage of API design, emphasizing identifying stakeholders, determining business objectives, and understanding user personas and behaviors.
Chapter 7, Defining and Validating an API Design, covers the techniques for defining and validating API design, starting with strategy-derived information and exploring API mocks, UI integration, and stakeholder iteration.
Chapter 8, Specifying an API, guides you on how to select an API architectural type based on behaviors and capabilities, refining the definition with constraints and industry practices and creating a machine-readable representation with governance rules.
Chapter 9, Development Techniques, offers a beginner-friendly guide to API development, covering language and framework selection, code generation from specifications, prototyping, and extending with business logic,
Chapter 10, API Security, explores API security, emphasizing its importance, distinguishing between authentication and authorization, and introducing a security testing technique called fuzzing.
Chapter 11, API Testing, introduces you to API testing methods, covering contract testing to ensure specification compliance, performance testing execution, and the connection of acceptance testing to user personas.
Chapter 12, API Quality Assurance, covers API quality assurance, introducing behavioral testing to validate against identified behaviors and setting up API monitors for periodic testing.
Chapter 13, Deploying the API, provides an overview of the API deployment process, covering continuous integration, agility, automated testing, deployment, and API gateway trade-offs.
Chapter 14, Observing API Behavior, introduces you to API usage analytics, APM, and user feedback analysis to identify and measure important metrics, usage patterns, and behavior.
Chapter 15, Distribution Channels, covers API distribution strategies, including pricing, API portals, marketplace listing, and documentation options to enhance user activation.
Chapter 16, User Support, delves into ways to ensure user success with an API, covering support channels, forums, and prioritizing bug fixes and feature requests from user feedback.
Chapter 17, API Versioning, explores techniques for managing multiple API versions, handling breaking changes effectively, and communicating changes to users using machine-readable methods.
Chapter 18, Planning API Retirement, discusses API retirement, covering its definition, considerations, and communication to users and conducting a retrospective to document what you have learned from the process.