July 2025
Intermediate to advanced
414 pages
10h 22m
English
Content preview from Learning API Styles
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Chapter 2. API Design Patterns
This chapter is a practical guide for the design phase of the API lifecycle. It aims to raise awareness of common API topics such as API design patterns, API security patterns, and API best practices.
A software design pattern is a blueprint for solving a particular, commonly occurring problem when creating software. Designing an API is a multidimensional process, but certain challenges are common regardless of the API style. Design patterns can guide the development of solutions to these challenges.
This chapter presents these patterns individually, in a cookbook-like format, to help you select them and integrate them into your design process. To see how API design patterns are applied in practice, you’ll implement some of these patterns in Chapter 5 when building an example REST API.
Examples of API Design Patterns
No matter what API style you work with, you need to answer questions such as: what natural language to use for API documentation, how to version the API, how to name interfaces, what encoding to use, and how to serve data. This section explores the patterns commonly used to address these questions.
To study API design patterns further, we recommend API Design Patterns by JJ Geewax (Manning, 2021), or additional sources such as these:
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The REST API Tutorial and Learn REST API Design overviews of REST APIs
Most of the time, you’ll develop APIs without access to their ...
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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.