Summary

Designing an API takes careful thought. An API is software, and the whole reason we write software is to help people solve problems. APIs need to solve a problem, and the better they solve that problem, the better quality they are. One thing that can help with API quality is to have a well-designed API. A well-designed API is one that is designed to fulfill the purpose for which it is used. In this chapter, you learned how to think through the purpose of an API by coming up with personas. You also learned some questions that you can ask to get to the heart of why an API needs to exist in the first place.

This chapter also showed you some ways to structure and document APIs. You learned about API specification and how you can use RAML to create design-driven specifications for an API. And, of course, you also got to try these things out and put them into practice! With a firm grasp of the principles of API design, you are ready to dig a little deeper into API specification languages and how to use them in creating good-quality APIs. We will dive into that in the next chapter.

Join our community on Discord

Join our community’s Discord space for discussions with the author and other readers:

https://discord.com/invite/nEN6EBYPq9