Whether you’re new to the field of API design or an old hand looking to brush up on the latest thinking, there are plenty of API design books to help. But which are the best books on API design? What should be on your list of essential API books this year? Read on for some top recommendations from the Tyk team.
API design principles
How you design your APIs impacts how they perform, how secure they are, how easily they scale, the extent of the value you can derive from their reusability, and the overall API experience for your consumers. Poor design decisions can have far-reaching consequences and be costly to unpick. That’s why understanding the principles of API design is so important – and why flicking through the best book on API design is a good idea before you dive in headfirst.
Let’s run through a few key API design principles before moving on to which books on API design will likely be most useful to you.
Designing for performance
Decisions around lightweight design can majorly impact your API’s overhead and payload size. This can reduce latency and improve response times, ensuring your API delivers the performance its consumers need. Be ready to think about data structures and manipulation during the design phase to ensure that your API performs as required in practice.
Designing for security
Designing your API to be secure is paramount, so you’ll need to pay close attention to authentication, authorisation, access control, encryption and more. Adopting DevSecOps to shift left on API security can help here, and you’ll need clear ownership and accountability and robust audit logging as well – along with an open source API gateway to make it easy to fine-tune your security, of course.
Designing for scalability
The growth of APIs, microservices and microservice gateway access patterns has created plenty of scope for rapid scaling. But the kind of scaling that rockets you to the top of your industry only happens with solid API design decisions. You’ll need to use efficient data structures, optimised queries, horizontal scaling techniques, and more to maintain performance and reliability as you scale. This is an area with which the API books we recommend below can help.
Designing for reusability
Unless you have money to burn and all the time in the world, embracing reusability is an excellent idea to achieve efficient, cost-effective API design. Clear interfaces, descriptive function and parameter names, excellent documentation, and more should all be on your priority list here, with many of the API design books below covering these.
The best API design books to read this year
With these principles in mind, let’s jump into our recommendations for the best books on API design.
Principles of Web API Design: Delivering Value with APIs and Microservices
By James Higginbotham
Few experts have more to share regarding API design, architectural and deployment patterns and microservices than industry stalwart James Higginbotham. His API design book covers the entire design lifecycle, including advice on choosing the best styles for each project: REST, gRPC, GraphQL, or event-based async APIs.
This is an excellent book for practical information on API design and an essential companion for any developer looking to address the wider organisational context. As such, whether you need to align stakeholders or scale the design process from small teams to the entire organisation, this is the book for you.
Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems
By Martin Kleppmann
Decisions around data structures feed into your API’s performance, scalability and more. This book puts all things data-related under the microscope, providing deep insights into the data landscape and practical tips that can feed your thought processes as you progress on your API design journey.
The Design of Web APIs
By Arnaud Lauret
This is a solid hands-on experience guide for understanding the characteristics of a well-designed API and exploring the entire API design lifecycle. Lauret includes plenty of examples that bring the techniques discussed to life, all set against a consumer-mindset to keep API design focused on outcomes. This is one of the best books on API design for those with little prior experience building APIs.
API Security in Action
By Neil Madden
From the same series as The Design of Web APIs, Neil Madden’s API Security in Action is an excellent book for anyone looking to build confidence in creating secure APIs. Madden clearly explains various security concepts and controls, taking readers through basics such as authentication, authorisation, audit logging, rate limiting and encryption to complex scenarios designed to respond to particular threat models. API design books don’t come much better than this when designing for security.
Hands-On RESTful API Design Patterns and Best Practices
By Harihara Subramanian and Pethuru Raj
This is a strong choice for beginners seeking to understand RESTful API design patterns and topics, including API gateways, security and the cloud. The examples are easy to follow, supporting readers to implement patterns programmatically. One element we found particularly useful is the book’s examination of using API connectors, layers and microservices to modernise legacy codebase. If you’re hunting for the best REST API books, this should certainly be on your reading list.
Learning GraphQL
By Eve Porcello and Alex Banks
While there are plenty of contenders regarding the best REST API books, the more recent growth of GraphQL means fewer offerings focused on API design in that area. However, one that certainly comes well recommended is Learning GraphQL by Eve Porcello and Alex Banks. The book contains handy tips on building a schema to describe your APIs and a host of other aspects of mastering GraphQL. An excellent choice for beginners looking to embrace GraphQL API design principles as part of an all-round introduction to the topic.
GraphQL in Action
By Samer Buna
Another great choice if GraphQL is your focus is Samer Buna’s GraphQL in Action. The book covers design principles and syntax all through to optimising your APIs’ performance. It’s packed with helpful, practical examples and design tips, from optimising GraphQL resolvers with data caching and batching to designing GraphQL fragments that match UK components’ data requirements.
Mastering API Architecture: Defining, Connecting, and Securing Distributed Systems and Microservices
By James Gough, Daniel Bryant et al.
Another recent publication, this book takes you from designing to operating to evolving API-based systems. Starting from the ground up, the book walks you through the strategies and practicalities of designing an API platform, building and testing REST APIs and embracing all that an API gateway can offer when implementing a microservices architecture. It’s definitely one of the better API books to help pave your way to successful API design.
Patterns for API Design: Simplifying Integration with Loosely Coupled Message Exchanges
By Olaf Zimmermann, Mirko Stocker et al.
From the same series as the best book on API design from James Higginbotham that topped our list, Zimmermann, Stocker et al.’s Patterns for API Design: Simplifying Integration with Loosely Coupled Message Exchanges is another top read. The book covers a wide range of domains, technologies and platforms, with a focus at all times on designing evolvable, high-quality APIs.
We particularly like the fact this book draws on expertise from a wide range of architects and developers and takes you from initial project launch and defining goals all the way through the API lifecycle. The book includes 44 design patterns, providing plenty of insights into the pros and cons of your API design decisions and where those decisions lead. The real-world project examples bring the concepts to life perfectly.
Microservices for the Enterprise
By Kasun Indrasiri
Microservices and APIs go hand-in-hand. If you’re new to designing and developing a microservices architecture and using APIs to sew it all together, this is one of the best API books to start you off. There’s a strong emphasis on designing for security, with real-world scenarios and battle-tested patterns included as examples.
Hacking APIs: Breaking Web Application Programming Interfaces
By Corey Ball
If you want insights into what you’re up against when designing secure APIs, this book is for you. Author Corey Ball walks through how hackers perform common attacks in plenty of detail so you can see where your API is most vulnerable and what you need to do about it. Whether it’s JSON Web Token attacks, excessive data exposure vulnerabilities, broken object level authorisation or a combination of attack vectors that are keeping you awake at night, this book will provide you with plenty of detail about the risks you face, ensuring you can respond appropriately when designing your API with security top of mind.
Designing Web APIs: Building APIs That Developers Love
By Brenda Jin, Saurabh Sahni and Amir Shevat
This is one of the best books on API design for blending design theory with hands-on exercises, enabling you to stay ahead of the game regarding your APIs. The authors guide readers from API design concepts to managing APIs in production, with thoughts on navigating complex design decisions that affect performance, security, scalability, reusability, etc. There’s a handy template included, too, providing everything needed for a clear, high-quality API design process, along with information on documentation, samples, handy tools and everything else you need for successful API design.
REST in Practice
By Ian Robinson
This is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding and effectively implementing REST architecture. This insightful book delves into the principles behind REST, offering practical guidance and real-world examples to help readers grasp its concepts and apply them in their own projects. From designing APIs to managing resources, Robinson provides clear explanations and best practices that empower readers to build scalable, reliable, and maintainable systems.
A Philosophy of Software Design
By John Ousterhout
This is a groundbreaking exploration of the fundamental principles underpinning effective software design. Ousterhout, a renowned computer scientist and creator of the Tcl scripting language, distils decades of experience into a concise and accessible guide for novices and seasoned software engineers. Through anecdotes and practical insights, he unveils timeless strategies for crafting functional but also elegant, maintainable, and scalable software.
Choosing the best book on API design
API design is a huge topic – hence the number of books on our list! The right book for you will depend on a range of factors, and, most likely, it will help you to flick through several of the recommendations above to broaden your API design knowledge.
One of the benefits of Tyk is that it makes it easy for even a relatively non-techy to design secure, performant, scalable and reusable APIs. That said, there’s no substitute for learning the underlying principles of API design to ensure your approach is the right one for your particular goals, business model and areas of focus. So, do add some of the best books on API design we’ve recommended above to your bedside reading pile.
Once you’ve worked through those and are on track with designing high-quality APIs that delight your consumers, why not check out these other book recommendations from Tyk’s senior team?
This blog has recently been updated to include the most up-to-date resources and recommendations for 2024.
