The API-University Series is a modular series of books on API-related topics. Each book focuses on a particular API topic, so you can select the topics within APIs, which are relevant for you.
This book offers an introduction to RESTful API Design. It covers the technical aspects of API Design, including the correct use of protocols, resources, URIs, representations, content types, data formats, parameters, HTTP status codes and HTTP methods. It also includes best practices for evolution and versioning, security, performance and availability issues.
API description languages are introduced as a way to document API design decisions. An API development methodology is introduced, which allows for the quick development.
Title: RESTful API Design
Author: Matthias Biehl
Release Date: 2016-08-30
Length: ca. 190 pages
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1514735164
ISBN-13: 978-1514735169
Categories:
COMPUTERS > Web > Web Programming
COMPUTERS > Web > Web Services & APIs
Looking for the big picture of building APIs? This book is for you!
Building APIs that consumers love should certainly be the goal of any API initiative. However, it is easier said than done. It requires getting the architecture for your APIs right. This book equips you with both foundations and best practices for API architecture. This book presents best practices for putting an infrastructure in place that enables efficient development of APIs.
This book is for you if you want to understand the big picture of API design and development, you want to define an API architecture, establish a platform for APIs or simply want to build APIs your consumers love.
This book is NOT for you, if you are looking for a step-by step guide for building APIs, focusing on every detail of the correct application of REST principles. In this case I recommend the book API Design of the API-University Series.
What is API architecture? Architecture spans the bigger picture of APIs and can be seen from several perspectives:
API architecture may refer to the architecture of the complete solution, consisting not only of the API itself, but also of an API client such as a mobile app and several other components. API solution architecture explains the components and their relations within the software solution.
API architecture may refer to the technical architecture of the API platform. An API platform provides an infrastructure for developing, running and managing APIs.
API architecture may refer to the architecture of the API portfolio. When building, running and exposing not only one, but several APIs, it becomes clear that certain building blocks of the API, runtime functionality and management functionality for the API need to be used over and over again. The API portfolio contains all APIs of the enterprise and needs to be managed like a product. API portfolio architecture analyzes the functionality of the API and organizes, manages and reuses the APIs.
API architecture may refer to the design decisions for a particular API proxy. To document the design decisions, API description languages are used (RAML and Swagger).
This book covers all of the above perspectives on API architecture. However, to become useful, the architecture needs to be put into practice. This is why this book covers an API methodology for design and development. An API methodology provides practical guidelines for putting API architecture into practice. It explains how to develop an API architecture into an API that consumers love.
A lot of the information on APIs is available on the web. Most of it is published by vendors of API products. I am always a bit suspicious of technical information pushed by product vendors. This book is different. In this book, a product-independent view on API architecture is presented.
The API-University Series is a modular series of books on API-related topics. Each book focuses on a particular API topic, so you can select the topics within APIs, which are relevant for you.
Keywords: API Management, API Architecture, Integration, API Description Languages, RAML, Swagger, API
Title: API Architecture
Author: Matthias Biehl
Release Date: 2015-05-22
Length: 190 pages
Language: English
ISBN-10: 150867664X
ISBN-13: 978-1508676645
Categories:
COMPUTERS > Web > Web Programming
COMPUTERS > Web > Web Services & APIs
This book offers an introduction to API Security with OAuth 2.0. In less than 80 pages you will gain an overview of the capabilities of OAuth. You will learn the core concepts of OAuth. You will get to know all 4 OAuth Flows that are used in cloud solutions and mobile apps. If you have tried to read the official OAuth specification, you may get the impression that OAuth is complicated.
This book explains OAuth in simple terms. The different OAuth Flows are visualized graphically using sequence diagrams. The diagrams allow you to see the big picture of the various OAuth interactions. This high-level overview is complemented with a rich set of example requests and responses and an explanation of the technical details. In the book, the challenges and benefits of OAuth are presented, followed by an explanation of the technical concepts of OAuth. The technical concepts include the actors, endpoints, tokens and the four OAuth flows. Each flow is described in detail, including the use cases for each flow. Extensions of OAuth - so-called profiles - are presented, such as OpenID Connect and the SAML2 Bearer Profile. Sequence diagrams are presented to explain the necessary interactions.
Title: OAuth 2.0 - Getting Started in Web-API Security
Author: Matthias Biehl
Release Date: 2014-11-15
Length: 76 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1507800911
https://api-university.com/books/oauth-2-0-book
Signup and login with a Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft account can be found in more and more web and mobile apps. Signup and login to a new app become so smooth and convenient that end-users are much more likely to try a new app. So how does this feature work?
It is realized with OpenID Connect, a standardized protocol for sharing end-user data in a secure and controlled manner. This book explains the overall concept of OpenID Connect, so we understand who the actors are, which endpoints and tokens are involved and how these elements interact in so-called flows. These flows tend to get confusing, so we visualize these flows as sequence diagrams, and show how to choose the flow that is appropriate for a given scenario. Using examples, we explore how the tokens are constructed, signed and encrypted with JWT, JWS, and JWE.
This is not a programming book, don’t expect implementations with a specific programming language or library. Instead, we focus on understanding OpenID Connect on a conceptual level, so we can design and architect apps that work with OpenID Connect. And OpenID Connect is the standard behind creating smooth login and signup experiences, increasing the customer signup rate, and creating highly converting apps.
Title: OpenID Connect - End User Identity for Apps and APIs
Author: Matthias Biehl
Release Date: 2019-02-02
Length: 137 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1979718479
https://api-university.com/books/openid-connect
Got RESTful APIs? Great. API consumers love them. But today, such RESTful APIs are not enough for the evolving expectations of API consumers. Their apps need to be responsive, event-based and react to changes in near real-time.
This results in a new set of requirements for the APIs, which power the apps. APIs now need to provide concepts such as events, notifications, triggers, and subscriptions. The REST architectural style does not natively support these concepts.
The good thing: we can engineer RESTful APIs that support events with a webhook infrastructure. The bad thing: it requires some heavy lifting. The webhook infrastructure needs to be developer-friendly, easy to use, reliable, secure and highly available.
With the best practices and design templates provided in this book, we want to help you extend your API portfolio with a modern webhook infrastructure. So you can offer both APIs and events that developers love to use.
Title: Webhooks - Events for RESTful APIs
Author: Matthias Biehl
Release Date: 2017-12-22
Length: 130 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1979717069
https://api-university.com/books/webhooks
Want to build APIs like Facebook? Since Facebook’s framework for building APIs, GraphQL, has become publicly available, this ambition seems to be within reach for many companies. And that is great. But first, let’s learn what GraphQL really is and – maybe even more importantly – let’s figure out how to apply GraphQL to build APIs that consumers love.
In this book, we take a hands-on approach to learning GraphQL. We first explore the concepts of the two GraphQL languages using examples. Then we start writing some code for our first GraphQL API. We develop this API step by step, from creating a schema and resolving queries, over mocking data and connecting data sources all the way to developing mutations and setting up event subscriptions.
Are your API consumers important to you? This book shows you how to apply a consumer-oriented design process for GraphQL APIs, so you can deliver what your consumers really want: an API that solves their problems and offers a great developer experience.
GraphQL and REST are competing philosophies for building APIs. It is not in the scope of this book to compare or discuss the two approaches. The focus of this book is on a hands-on approach for learning GraphQL.
Title: GraphQL API Design
Author: Matthias Biehl
Release Date: 2018-01-30
Length: 99 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1979717526
https://api-university.com/books/graphql-api-design
What is the right way to build a cool new API? For a long time, REST was thought to be the only appropriate tool for building modern APIs. But in recent years, another tool was added to the toolbox, when Facebook published GraphQL, the philosophy, and framework powering its popular API. More and more tech companies tried GraphQL and adopted it as one of their philosophies for API design. Some built GraphQL API next to their existing REST API, some replaced their REST API with GraphQL, and even others ignored the GraphQL trend to focus only on their REST API. However, not only the tech companies are divided. Following the discussions around REST and GraphQL, there seem to be two camps of gurus leading very emotional discussions.
This book intends to clear up the confusion and enable us to make our own decision. For our API. By having the necessary criteria and background info, we can choose if the hammer or the screwdriver is better for our API project. This book will not say: use the hammer or use the screwdriver. Instead, this book will enable us to make a smart, reasonable and case-specific decision, a decision tailored to the specific API we are designing.
Title: REST & GraphQL - A Discussion on API Design
Author: Matthias Biehl
Release Date: 2018
Length: 61 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1717109378
https://api-university.com/books/rest-graphql
This book gets you a running start with serverless GraphQL APIs on Amazon’s AWS AppSync. GraphQL is now a viable option for modern API design. And since Facebook, Yelp, and Shopify have built successful APIs with GraphQL, many companies consider following in the technological footsteps of these tech giants. Using GraphQL is great, but by itself, it is only half the rent: It requires the manual installation and maintenance of software infrastructure components.
AppSync is a cloud-based platform for GraphQL APIs. It is serverless, so you waste no time setting up infrastructure. You pay only what you use, so no upfront investment is needed, and it may save your organizations thousands of dollars in IT costs.
Whether you are new to GraphQL, or you are an experienced GraphQL developer, this book will provide you with the knowledge needed to get started with AWS AppSync. After quickly covering the GraphQL foundations, you will dive into the practice of developing APIs with AWS AppSync with in-depth walkthroughs, screenshots, and code samples. The book guides you through the step-by-step process of creating a GraphQL schema, developing GraphQL APIs, connecting data sources, developing resolvers with AppSync templates, securing your API, offering real-time data, developing offline support and synchronization for your apps and much more.
Title: Serverless GraphQL APIs with Amazon’s AWS AppSync
Author: Matthias Biehl
Release Date: 2018-05-30
Length: 188 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1717110701
https://api-university.com/books/graphql-aws-appsync
This is a book for developers, who not only want to develop for Alexa but also want to make money with the Alexa voice assistant. Alexa, the voice platform with the broadest adoption, helps developers like you and me, to develop, market and monetize their Alexa Skills and offer them on the Alexa Store.
In this book, you learn step-by-step how to create your first Alexa Skill with the Alexa Developer Console, AWS Lambda, and the Alexa CLI. We write code using node.js and the Alexa SDK.
You get a deep-dive into the various ways of making money with Alexa. You learn about the business models for Alexa Skills, marketing and monetizing your Alexa Skill on and off the Alexa Store, opportunities for offering in-skill purchases, and about programming the various purchase and payment flows.
We explain many advanced features of Alexa in plain English, such as account linking, audio streaming, session management and much more. We show how to personalize your Skill with the user’s data and linking the Skill to popular cloud apps, such as Spotify, Google and many more. This will help you create unique apps that stand out on the market and improve the lives of many Alexa users.
Title: Making Money with Alexa Skills - A Developer’s Guide
Author: Matthias Biehl
Release Date: 2019-03-05
Length: 225 pages
ISBN-13: 9781795831123
https://api-university.com/books/alexa
Every month the API-University Book Club delivers another book from the API-University Series. Straight to your inbox. With each book, you get one of the best resources to deep-dive into a new topic in the API space.
Members of the API-University Book Club get:- One book from the API-University Series per month- Books in EPUB and PDF format- Self-paced learning- Cancel any time
https://api-university.com/books/book-club