Book Review: “Designing APIs with Swagger and OpenAPI”

Disclaimer: this post includes affiliate links; I may receive compensation if you purchase the book from the different links provided in this post.

This review is about Designing APIs with Swagger and OpenAPI by Joshua S. Ponelat and Lukas L. Rosenstock from Manning.

I'm continuing my API journey by reading books, viewing relevant YouTube videos, and reading relevant IETF RFCs.

Today is a book review.

Facts

• 21 chapters
• $38.39 (eBook)

Chapters

• Part 1: Describing APIs
  1. Introducing APIs and OpenAPI
  2. Getting set up to make API requests
  3. Our first taste of OpenAPI definitions
  4. Using Swagger Editor to write OpenAPI definitions
  5. Describing API responses
  6. Creating resources
  7. Adding authentication and authorization
  8. Preparing and hosting API documentation
• Part 2: Design first
  9. Designing a web application
  10. Creating an API design using OpenAPI
  11. Building a change workflow around API design–first
  12. Implementing frontend code and reacting to changes
  13. Building a backend with Node.js and Swagger Codegen
  14. Integrating and releasing the web application
• Part 3: Extending APIs
  15. Designing the next API iteration
  16. Designing schemas with composition in OpenAPI
  17. Scaling collection endpoints with filters and pagination
  18. Supporting the unhappy path: Error handling with problem+json
  19. Improving input validation with advanced JSON Schema
  20. Versioning an API and handling breaking changes
  21. The API prerelease checklist

The book goes through designing a complete API via a demo project, the Farmstall API.

Pros and cons

The review is concise, to say the least.

The book's main benefit is also its main issue: it focuses on beginners. Everything is very detailed. For example, the authors dedicated chapter 11 to explaining Git's basics.

I'm not an API expert, but I didn't learn anything. Hence, I don't have a lot to say.

Conclusion

If you're a true newbie, i.e., you know nothing about HTTP, requests and responses, OpenAPI, and Postman, this book is for you. It goes into great detail in explaining everything from scratch.

If you have more than a passing familiarity with any of the above, I'm afraid it will be a loss of your money and time.

Originally published at A Java Geek on July 16th, 2023