The use of APIs have been around for decades from web, desktops, to mobiles, and everywhere from software to hardware. They are ubiquitous and pretty much everywhere these days. No doubt even the microwave and the washing machine uses some form of an API or a stack of APIs. Now as a result of REST and HTTP as well as cloud computing even more APIs have started to flourish. The value in an API depends on the usability and scalability of its design. Badly developed APIs are unnaturally designed and cause grief to developers both consumers and providers. Consuming applications often times built as mashups rely on such APIs to provide access to resources and with badly mapped functions and parameters it can impinge on quality of the application as a whole. One can explore a behemoth of APIs on the programmableweb. API development is a craft and an art which one can really only get right from exploring, learning and experience in understanding both the application as well as its users. Below are a few useful books for API design.
