The API Craft Book

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Kin Lane

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Jan 28, 2015, 4:27:08 PM1/28/15
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I need another project like I need a hole in the head, so I want to put this out there for Apigee and the community to run with (or shoot down).

I'd love to see a well crafted, curated, published version of the best from API Craft forums. 

Sure I can come here and find the conversations around oAuth, hypermedia, and other significant aspects of our space, but I'd love to have a kindle, or even a physical book laying around the house. 

Sam? Scott? Good opportunity for Apigee.... ;-)


Ted M. Young [@jitterted]

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Jan 28, 2015, 6:35:46 PM1/28/15
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I think that's a great idea!

I would be up for doing a chapter in such a book, but I know I've not got the energy for a full book.

I've published a couple of books on Leanpub.com, which might fit the bill.

;ted



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Sam Ramji

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Jan 28, 2015, 10:58:32 PM1/28/15
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The only important question is whether it's good for the community.

My initial reaction is that this is a great thing - reflecting the community's wisdom and making it available to the broader world.

Particularly, you seem like the right person to galvanize sentiment around this project.

Our community guidelines state that the content here belongs to each of us and all of us.  A collaborative project to build this book seems like the right approach.  The content is rich enough that finding a publisher should not be hard.

The hard part will be finding an editor/author!

PSA: While a few of us on these forums work for Apigee, we strive to uphold our community guidelines and "represent ourselves, not our employer".  Most of the time we put in on our own hours and will continue to.


On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 1:27 PM, Kin Lane <kin...@gmail.com> wrote:

sune jakobsson

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Jan 30, 2015, 6:09:35 AM1/30/15
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Books are a bit 80'sh, so personally I would prefer a web site, with live stuff.

Sune

Kin Lane

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Jan 30, 2015, 2:48:12 PM1/30/15
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Agreed, it should be more interactive, kindle + web + mobile version would be nice.

I think a guide format could be found within a print format too. 

I'd just like to be able to easily use as reference, to look up nuggets of wisdom when I need, but also explore and learn, and re-learn when I have time.

Who knows...might happen some day. ;-)

sgoto

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Jan 30, 2015, 7:32:05 PM1/30/15
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On Fri, Jan 30, 2015 at 3:09 AM, sune jakobsson <sune.ja...@gmail.com> wrote:
Books are a bit 80'sh, so personally I would prefer a web site, with live stuff.

Seems like an interesting idea. What about starting with a community driven github repository?

I try to keep most of my thoughts in my blog, and I've seem a bunch of good links flying around here, and I'm wondering what would happen if we got all of those links organized collectively.

I'm also wondering what kind of content would be different from this book, which IMHO covers a lot. Personally, I don't know how much progress we made since that book was published (at least in these regards, which interest me professionally on my day job).



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Austin Wright

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Feb 3, 2015, 2:05:57 PM2/3/15
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A while ago I created, and have been maintaining, the section on HTTP at https://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/http with similar goals.

I've also just finished RESTful Web APIs by Leonard Richardson and Mike Amundsen, this has everything I could want to put into an API book and then some. It's fantastic. I just wish there was a collection of this information on the Web somewhere (and indeed, this is what I hope to turn Web Platform Docs into). (I would still call it a service, though: I consider the Web a single application containing multiple services, or servers. History should have gone with "SOAP API" and "Hypermedia Service", not the other way around!)

On Web Platform Docs, I'd like to fill out more details on HTTP before going more abstract into hypermedia. The wiki already has extensive documentation on the de-facto hypermedia format (HTML) so hypermedia will obviously become a topic. Other hypermedia formats like JSON-LD have become W3C Recommendations too, so I don't think there'd be any problem with detailing hypermedia services/APIs in the long run.

If anyone has any contributions, by all means, be bold!

Austin Wright.

David Biesack

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Feb 4, 2015, 11:33:16 AM2/4/15
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