Practical API Design

What Hacker News says

1. _pmf_Aug 2017
   My take: you do not truly understand modularity until you have had to work with a third party framework where your software is integrated as plugin. Working with Eclipse / PDE / CDT has taught me more about modularity (good and bad) in 2 years than a decade of green field development (plus, I can now write a usable Eclipse plugin faster that I can write the equivalent Vim function ...). I also recommend "Practical API Design" (which contains both large scale advise and tiny but important details regarding source compatibility vs binary compatibility with aspects that have been unknown to me after several years of developing Java) and "Java Application Architecture" (which contains decoupling strategies, but you only learn to appreciate those after you have encountered the generic problem pattern).
   Show morethread
2. _pmf_Aug 2014
   For a very deep, thorough and painful treatment instead of feel-good books, read "Practical API Design" by Jaroslav Tulach. Yes, it's Java, but it exemplifies the fundamental tradeoff that the feel-good books ignore: the more powerful you make your API for users, the less potential for evolution and long-term maintenance your API retains.
   thread
3. malandrewDec 2010
   More recently there has been a lot of talk on API design and I'd like to start thinking about the design of the API for the startup I am working on.

   What are all the best online (i.e. free) resources on API design?

   What are the best (i.e. most elegant) APIs to study?

   P.S. my goal here is to have a thread that complements this previous thread asking about the best books on API design: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1668561

   Here are the recommendations from that previous thread:

   Online Resources:

   -- "The Little Manual of API Design" by Jasmin Blanchette http://chaos.troll.no/~shausman/api-design/api-design.pdf

   -- GoogleTechTalk "How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters" by Joshua Bloch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAb7hSCtvGw (video) http://lcsd05.cs.tamu.edu/slides/keynote.pdf (slides)

   -- "Designing Qt-Style C++ APIs" by Matthias Ettrich http://doc.trolltech.com/qq/qq13-apis.html

   -- "Practical API Design" site http://wiki.apidesign.org/wiki/Main_Page

   Books:

   -- "Practical API Design" by Jaroslav Tulach http://amzn.com/1430209739

   -- "Interface-Oriented Design" by Ken Pugh - http://pragprog.com/titles/kpiod/interface-oriented-design

   -- "Service-oriented design with Ruby on Rails" by Paul Dix http://amzn.com/0321659368

   -- "C Interfaces and Implementations" http://sites.google.com/site/cinterfacesimplementations/ http://amzn.com/0201498413

   Show morethread