Here are 13 books that API Management fans have personally recommended if you like
API Management.
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I specialize in helping organizations scale their API design and development processes and improve their API governance. With a background in software engineering, I now work full-time as an API consultant. I hope you find the books on this list enjoyable.
There are quite a few books on web API design, but James’ book is my favorite. I like how the book delves into not only the technology of web APIs but also James’ unique approach to API design—known as the Align Define Design Refine method (ADDR).
This methodical approach to API design begins by aligning the team on the business capabilities to be exposed by the API. Subsequently, the team can model and design the API operations that implement those capabilities using the techniques described in the book.
It is a valuable methodology to have in any software team's design toolbox. I highly recommend James’s book.
Principles of Web API Design brings together principles and processes to help you succeed across the entire API design lifecycle. Drawing on extensive in-the-trenches experience, leading consultant James Higginbotham helps you align every stakeholder on specific outcomes, design APIs that deliver value, and scale the design process from small teams to the entire organization.
Higginbotham helps you bring an "outside-in" perspective to API design to reflect the voices of customers and product teams, map requirements to specific and well-organized APIs, and choose the right API style for writing them. He walks through a real-world…
I specialize in helping organizations scale their API design and development processes and improve their API governance. With a background in software engineering, I now work full-time as an API consultant. I hope you find the books on this list enjoyable.
I've seen organizations struggle with adopting a business-led API strategy. A key part of doing this involves creating an effective operating model around how different business units or departments can own and deliver APIs effectively.
Luis' book addresses this challenge by presenting various operating models for APIs (centralized, federated, and platform-based) and offering guidance on creating a platform-based operating model. He addresses API architecture as well and I like his idea of API-Led architectures.
This is my go-to reference for organizations that wish to adopt APIs at scale and need to organize multiple teams and departments that own APIs. I found myself referencing it frequently on a project and highly recommend it.
A strategy and implementation guide for building, deploying, and managing APIs
Key Features
Comprehensive, end-to-end guide to business-driven enterprise APIs
Distills years of experience with API and microservice strategies
Provides detailed guidance on implementing API-led architectures in any businessBook Description
APIs are the cornerstone of modern, agile enterprise systems. They enable access to enterprise services from a wide variety of devices, act as a platform for innovation, and open completely new revenue streams.
Enterprise API Management shows how to define the right architecture, implement the right patterns, and define the right organization model for business-driven APIs.
I specialize in helping organizations scale their API design and development processes and improve their API governance. With a background in software engineering, I now work full-time as an API consultant. I hope you find the books on this list enjoyable.
This is the API design patterns book. I love this book because it provides a comprehensive set of well-described and easy-to-reference API design patterns. It establishes a common domain vocabulary for discussing APIs. Each pattern comes with a UML diagram that gives it a level of exactness and makes it quickly parseable. Even without reading the full description of a pattern, I can look at its UML diagram and promptly get its essence.
The book is divided into three parts. There are multiple reading paths through the book—so I didn’t need to read it end to end in a sequential order. After going through the introduction to understand the structure and layout of the book, I could jump to the patterns and use case examples most relevant to my needs. The book also comes with a companion website. This is an excellent work and a handy reference for all API…
Proven Patterns for Designing Evolvable High-Quality APIs--For Any Domain, Technology, or Platform
APIs enable breakthrough innovation and digital transformation in organizations and ecosystems of all kinds. To create user-friendly, reliable and well-performing APIs, architects, designers, and developers need expert design guidance. This practical guide cuts through the complexity of API conversations and their message contents, introducing comprehensive guidelines and heuristics for designing APIs sustainably and specifying them clearly, for whatever technologies or platforms you use.
In Patterns for API Design: Simplifying Integration with Loosely Coupled Message Exchanges, five expert architects and developers cover the entire API lifecycle, from launching projects…
I specialize in helping organizations scale their API design and development processes and improve their API governance. With a background in software engineering, I now work full-time as an API consultant. I hope you find the books on this list enjoyable.
The book provides a modern approach to API architecture. In the section on API Traffic Management, I appreciated the discussion on API gateways and service meshes—their history, features, taxonomy, and common implementation pitfalls. It was great to see Kubernetes-related examples for API gateways and service meshes. I also liked the coverage of the API lifecycle, deployment, observability, security, and testing topics.
The book provides a very good architectural perspective, using C4 diagrams to explain the case studies and Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) to provide guidelines on questions to ask when making an API architecture decision. This is a great book on API architecture.
Most organizations with a web presence build and operate APIs; the doorway for customers to interact with the company's services. Designing, building, and managing these critical programs affect everyone in the organization, from engineers and product owners to C-suite executives. But the real challenge for developers and solution architects is creating an API platform from the ground up.
With this practical book, you'll learn strategies for building and testing REST APIs that use API gateways to combine offerings at the microservice level. Authors James Gough, Daniel Bryant, and Matthew Auburn demonstrate how simple additions to this infrastructure can help engineers…
My passion for computer science started while spending my free time gaming in my young adult days, leading me to experiment with C++ and then dive into enterprise-level Java applications during high school. My enthusiasm for Java propelled me to teach and share my knowledge through Java and Spring tutorials on YouTube. I also frequent conferences where I exchange ideas on various software topics. My constant wish to contribute further to the community is filled by writing technical books. This mix of teaching, creating, and constant learning fuels me and pushes me further into the tech world. I really hope you will enjoy this selection of technical books!
This is another amazing book that offers a fresh view of microservice architecture and its benefits and challenges.
Besides advice on designing and managing microservices for large-scale Java applications, the part that stuck out to me the most was the deep dive into cloud-native development and the "Just enough Application Server (JeAS)" approach.
Any book that makes me rethink and improve my strategies for building resilient and robust apps is a gem.
Microservices break down a large application into smaller components, each interacting with each other to create a united whole. As each component can start, stop, and scale independently, so the whole system benefits from better fault-tolerance and resilience.
Enterprise Java Microservices is an example-rich tutorial that shows readers how to design and manage large-scale Java applications as a collection of microservices.
Key features
* The microservices mental model
* Fault tolerance with Netflix Hystrix
* Securing your microservices
* Deploying to the cloud
Audience
This book is for Java developers familiar with distributed n-tier application architecture.
I have been coding for over 30 years. I’ve seen some miserable interfaces, and some large programs that collapse under their own weight. Software was, at one point, notorious for being late, over budget, and unreliable. These books have helped turn the corner on these failings, and I have found each of them very valuable in my day-to-day programming. While you can learn technique and even languages online, the kind of insight found in these books is rare and worth spending time and money on.
The .Net world is changing fast, and this is a terrific book to help you keep up. This tome covers so many topics it is hard to list them all, but while it doesn’t go super-deep into any one topic it does provide enough of an overview to understand what the technology is and how you might put it to work. Software Architecture with C# 10 and .NET 6 has helped me understand what exists and what is coming and to decide where to put my mental energy
Design scalable and high-performance enterprise applications using the latest features of C# 10 and .NET 6
Key Features
Gain comprehensive software architecture knowledge and the skillset to create fully modular apps
Solve scalability problems in web apps using enterprise architecture patterns
Master new developments in front-end architecture and the application of AI for software architectsBook Description
Software architecture is the practice of implementing structures and systems that streamline the software development process and improve the quality of an app. This fully revised and expanded third edition, featuring the latest features of .NET 6 and C# 10, enables you to acquire…
My passion for developing production-ready, cooperating microservices began in 2008 when I first started assisting customers in creating distributed systems—long before the term “microservices” was coined. During that time, I faced significant challenges, including grappling with the “Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing”. Since then, I’ve dedicated most of my career to deepening my understanding of these complexities and finding ways to address them through robust architecture, design patterns, and the right tools.
A common reason for microservice projects to fail is a lack of understanding of how to build resilient and fault-tolerant microservices.
This book was a game-changer for me, providing essential strategies to address these challenges. It taught me how to avoid anti-patterns like Cascading Failures and embrace patterns like Circuit Breaker and Bulkhead to manage temporary network issues and overload situations. The real-world solutions it offers were immediately applicable to my projects.
A single dramatic software failure can cost a company millions of dollars - but can be avoided with simple changes to design and architecture. This new edition of the best-selling industry standard shows you how to create systems that run longer, with fewer failures, and recover better when bad things happen. New coverage includes DevOps, microservices, and cloud-native architecture. Stability antipatterns have grown to include systemic problems in large-scale systems. This is a must-have pragmatic guide to engineering for production systems. If you're a software developer, and you don't want to get alerts every night for the rest of your…
My passion for computer science started while spending my free time gaming in my young adult days, leading me to experiment with C++ and then dive into enterprise-level Java applications during high school. My enthusiasm for Java propelled me to teach and share my knowledge through Java and Spring tutorials on YouTube. I also frequent conferences where I exchange ideas on various software topics. My constant wish to contribute further to the community is filled by writing technical books. This mix of teaching, creating, and constant learning fuels me and pushes me further into the tech world. I really hope you will enjoy this selection of technical books!
To be honest, I did not expect to learn something new from this book, given the fact that I have been working on enterprise-level applications since high school, which mostly follow a microservice architecture.
Still, I have to admit that in Richardson's discussion on decomposition strategies, inter-service communication, and managing distributed data, I still got some valuable insights into dealing with such an architecture. Particularly, the saga pattern for managing transactions was definitely a game-changer for me.
My passion for developing production-ready, cooperating microservices began in 2008 when I first started assisting customers in creating distributed systems—long before the term “microservices” was coined. During that time, I faced significant challenges, including grappling with the “Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing”. Since then, I’ve dedicated most of my career to deepening my understanding of these complexities and finding ways to address them through robust architecture, design patterns, and the right tools.
No matter how advanced our tools for developing resilient and scalable microservices become, the million-dollar question remains: How do we effectively break up a monolith into microservices?
This book offers excellent guidance on this challenge. I found its starting point grounded in Domain-Driven Design and its concepts like Bounded Contexts and Aggregates particularly valuable. These concepts are key to mapping microservices to a real-world domain model. I also appreciate Sam’s advice, to begin with a few relatively large microservices aligned with Bounded Contexts and only break them into smaller services when there’s a clear business case for doing so.
How do you detangle a monolithic system and migrate it to a microservice architecture? How do you do it while maintaining business-as-usual? As a companion to Sam Newman's extremely popular Building Microservices, this new book details a proven method for transitioning an existing monolithic system to a microservice architecture.
With many illustrative examples, insightful migration patterns, and a bevy of practical advice to transition your monolith enterprise into a microservice operation, this practical guide covers multiple scenarios and strategies for a successful migration, from initial planning all the way through application and database decomposition. You'll learn several tried and tested…
My passion for developing production-ready, cooperating microservices began in 2008 when I first started assisting customers in creating distributed systems—long before the term “microservices” was coined. During that time, I faced significant challenges, including grappling with the “Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing”. Since then, I’ve dedicated most of my career to deepening my understanding of these complexities and finding ways to address them through robust architecture, design patterns, and the right tools.
Apache Kafka is the industry standard for real-time event streaming, an essential component for large-scale, high-performance microservice ecosystems.
Despite being new to Kafka when I read this book, it quickly brought me up to speed on key concepts that underpin its scalability and real-time capabilities, such as the commit log, topic partitions, and consumer groups. The book also introduces other critical Kafka features like the schema registry, Kafka Connect, and stream processing with Kafka Streams and ksqlDB. The practical examples provided were straightforward to apply and adapt to my own use cases.
Kafka in Action is a practical, hands-on guide to building Kafka-based data pipelines. Filled with real-world use cases and scenarios, this book probes Kafka's most common use cases, ranging from simple logging through managing streaming data systems for message routing, analytics, and more.
In systems that handle big data, streaming data, or fast data, it's important to get your data pipelines right. Apache Kafka is a wicked-fast distributed streaming platform that operates as more than just a persistent log or a flexible message queue.
