Design and Build Great Web APIs

Chapter 3Modeling APIs

Now that we have the groundwork set from the previous two chapters, we’re ready to start the process of building our Onboarding API project. And as you can tell from the title of this part of the book (The Design Phase), we’ll spend time working on the various design aspects of API development that happen before we start writing code.

In this chapter, we’ll take a look at some general theory on how interfaces work (UI and API) and then talk about how we can harness these interface patterns as we model our own API project. Along the way we’ll learn about API stories and about translating these prose stories into API workflow documents. We’ll also learn how to use a very powerful tool—the Node Package Manager (npm)—to manage ...