Design and Build Great Web APIs

Chapter 1Getting Started with API First

This first chapter provides background information that’ll come in handy throughout the rest of the book. We’ll start by talking about an important principle—API First—and then move on to a quick review of a handful of existing services at our fictitious company, BigCo, Inc. We’ll use curl, the first in a series of command-line tools, as part of our API toolkit for exploring BigCo’s APIs.

That’s a lot to cover! So let’s start by discussing the power and advantage of the principle known as API First.