REST API Design – A Beginner’s Reading List

There’s no better place to start than Steve Yegge’s post, where he dicusses the Jeff Bezos memo that kicked off the service architecture revolution at Amazon:
https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX

The RESTful cookbook is a your next stop – an easy to digest of many of the key topics:
http://restcookbook.com/

Then you should read this classic worked example – ‘How to GET a Cup of Coffee’:
https://www.infoq.com/articles/webber-rest-workflow

(If you read the comments section of the article, you’ll get a useful taste of the kind of design discussions that come up in the field)

The REST API Design Handbook is a good, quick read, once you’re starting to get more confidence:

It’s a little dated now, but the RESTful Web Services Cookbook is a great resource once you start needing deeper coverage on topics such as asynchronous calls and versioning:

Lastly, if you want to see a standard for REST API design published by an organisation that’s got some serious experience, check out this public document from Zalando:
https://opensource.zalando.com/restful-api-guidelines/

It is long, but you’ll find yourself agreeing with most of it.

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