September 2018
Intermediate to advanced
230 pages
5h 11m
English
Content preview from Designing Web APIs
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Chapter 9. Developer Resources
Building a great API is not enough if no one knows how to use it. As you design your API, make sure that you guide and enable developers by providing the learning materials they need to succeed.
Developer resources are a set of assets that you should provide your developers so that they can improve how they use your API. There are many types of developer resources out there, each affecting different aspects of the development life cycle. In this chapter, we cover the major resources that most companies provide. We also provide some tips and tricks to make them work for you.
API Documentation
Let’s begin with the most basic resource that is required for every API or platform—documentation.
Documentation is where developers come to learn about your API. Whether you’re providing a simple README file or developing a full website for your developers, it is critical to clearly document how they can most effectively use your API. There are several different aspects to good documentation, covering all stages of the development life cycle.
Getting Started
Getting Started guides are a common type of tutorial that walk the developer from unfamiliarity with an API to initial success. In many cases, this comes in the form of completing a “Hello World” exercise—a reference to the common practice within the engineering profession of getting a program or API to churn out “Hello World” as a proof of success. The API doesn’t literally have to return “Hello, world”, ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.