RESTful API Design Principles

As a vast network of interconnected devices on the web sets the stage for the future of human cognition, RESTful APIs operate quietly behind the scenes. Representational State Transfer (REST) defines the architectural style of the web to produce distributed, loosely coupled systems that enable and extend this network.

Highly recommended for software architects and technical leaders interested in core philosophy, this book is not just another technical manual. Readers move beyond basic API endpoints to engage with the technical rationale in REST's constraints: client-server, stateless, cacheable, layered, uniform interface, and code on demand. The author examines interactions between the building blocks of the web to explain the why behind these architectural elements, not just the how. For students, engineers, or software developers actively working on REST web services, this book invites you to think like an architect. It treats API design as a serious discipline of software architecture, based on first principles.

By the end, readers gain the expertise needed to solve the most complex API design problems through a comprehensive skill set grounded in the timeless architecture of the web itself. This book provides an essential foundation to create APIs that stand the test of time.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
● How and why REST became so popular.
● Principle of addressability, a close look at the API surface.
● Understanding HTTP methods intentionally.
● Improving resources step-by-step.
● Advantages of self-guided systems.
● Using layers to protect REST APIs from attacks.
● Architectural strategies that win the future.

WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR
This book is for aspiring and experienced software architects, engineers, and API designers with a working background in web development and HTTP who wish to master the principles of RESTful API design.

1. Breaking Points
2. Resource Identification
3. Resource Manipulation
4. Resource Representation
5. Resource State Management
6. API Security
7. Performance and Scale
8. Further Readings

Alex Rodriguez is a software architect, engineer, and author. He is an expert in RESTful API design and enjoys writing about the fundamental principles of REST. Alex was educated at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and traces the origins of a 20+ year career in information technology to the early days of the web, as an undergraduate student in the 90s, when literary theory and computer science converged.

Alex brings a multidisciplinary approach, combining deep technical expertise with an understanding of quantitative methods as they apply to decision making in software engineering. He maintains a serious interest in good API design and views it as essential for building scalable and secure cloud-based systems. Alex led a platform modernization project at IBM, successfully migrating hundreds of legacy Java EE services to a microservices architecture. He has since joined Alcon, a company specializing in eye care products, to work on software that integrates medical devices with each other and the cloud.