APIs: A Strategy Guide: Creating Channels with Application Programming Interfaces

You should read this book if you are remotely interested in the following:1. Why your company needs to have an API2. How to design, secure and manage the API3. What API strategies your company should adopt, including legal and operational considerations4. How to measure the success of the API5. How to drive API engagementThe authors have years of experience in the API space and I think they did a pretty good job distilling their collective wisdom and learned best practices in this "short and sweet" booklet (134-pages!) I think it is important for the success of any API initiative that *all* stakeholders read this book to get on the same page of what needs to take place to ensure the success of the initiative. It's hard to argue with the "tried and true" practices of which this book is rife.If you're interested in getting into the nitty gritty technical details of how to build an API, I highly recommend RESTful Web Services Cookbook: Solutions for Improving Scalability and Simplicity as a technical companion read to this book. Read this book first, and then delve into the technical details with Subbu's book.If you're an executive who's on the fence regarding APIs, you must read this book to get educated on the subject. It's important for your team to get your full support which they won't unless you fully understand the whats, hows and whys of APIs.You need to learn how to speak API and this book will get you fluent in no time.

A good high level overview, probably targeted more towards a business audience than a developer audience. Helpful for anyone interested in a broad understanding of API strategy and tech basics, and enough to be dangerous when dealing with developers and business stakeholders. Recommended!

I read through the many reviews ahead of purchasing the digital addition of this book. As a product manager / program manager I found the book to be very helpful. Naturally, it depends on your needs and perspective. I'm not surprised those with experience around implementation of APIs or the business concepts around API's might not find the content as helpful. But, for those that are not familiar with API implementation - or, more specifically - how to think about the business strategy around an organization considering development of an APIR platform, I think the book provides a lot of helpful information - it's more about considerations, business models, general thoughts on agreements, etc. If a product manager has to put together a strategy document, this book would be very helpful.

I had higher hopes for this. The book was written by management and technical folks from Netflix, NPR, and Apigee and as such they have great experience at running large and very popular APIs that serve both public and partner constituencies.The front half of the book is advocacy: "You should have an API, here's why." Snooze. If you are reading this you probably get this already.The back half boils down to probably about a condensed 5 pages of checklists on the subjects of metrics, security, user management, legal, and community engagement. This was more useful as it gave a more complete picture of all of the planning items on the table that don't have to do with technical execution of the API. This was all useful but not detailed enough.

Most resources out there on APIs tend to be narrowly focused on some particular technical aspect (e.g SOA design, REST, SOAP etc), but there are few resources that provide an overview of how all that actually fits in with a business. This book goes into everything from the types of APIs, the business cases for each, API business models and pricing strategies, basic API design tips (some REST concepts, but it doesn't go in too deeply; there are lots of other books for that!), versioning options, API user management and security, API operations and asset management, legal considerations, and how to build an API developer community. Really an excellent resource for getting prepared to expose an API for internal or public use.

I thought it was a good overview and a good summary of what all the hype and noise is about. It is not a comprehensive technical how-to manual but it is technical enough to be useful.

I bought this book to understand the business value and operational aspects behind why APIs are needed. I have used APIs in my Netsuite-Zuora-Salesforce integration projects and in my work with the Google Analytics API.This book is fantastic. The reader needs to be a little technical (I have rudimentary Python and JavaScript skills which I learned on my own - I will NOT call myself a coder, but I can understand some code written in these languages). Even if you are not technical at all, as long as you are willing to do a few Google or Wikipedia searches to understand one or two concepts you may not know, this is still a great read.

This book is an excellent overview of APIs as they relate to digital strategy. It's concise, yet thorough. The book doesn't delve deeply into technical details; it's essentially a primer for those of us who are not developers but who work closely with developers on integrated teams.I'm not saying that developers won't benefit from reading this book. The big-picture perspective and the examples of how organizations (e.g., NPR) are using and sharing their APIs are insightful and inspiring.