Essential REST API News for 2015/01/26 - REST API Tutorial

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Hello and welcome to the first in, what we hope, is a long and helpful line of emails highlighting the best in RESTful API design, practice, and thought. This is a field that continues to innovate at a rapid clip. We surf forums, bookmark whitepapers for debate, and attend API-specific conferences because we're a bit weird like that.

Trying to separate the copious online chaff from the wheat can be a time consuming endeavor; so let us do that for you! Just because you have other things you'd rather do with your time doesn't mean you can't benefit. You do your thing, and we'll share ours. Everybody wins!  

This Past Week in News (2015/01/26)

New Learning Resources
With the new year comes a couple of new places to learn about API design. The first comes from Jason Harmon, head of API Design at Paypal. He has started a YouTube series called "API Workshop" covering nuanced issues in service creation. Simultaneously, Ole Lensmar and Lorinda Bradon, both with Smartbear Software, have started the APIsUncensored podcast. For those that enjoy their API information as something other than a long page of text, those are two great options.

Design Foundations
REST APIs are a natural evolution of web's most influential early leaders. In "The Vision of Kay and Fielding: Growable Systems that Last for Decades", Mike Amundsen draws compelling parallels between object orientated programming and REpresentational State Transfer (REST).

Fundamental Introduction
The final link this week is from InfoQ. This past week they published a collection of their 2014 articles in a handy e-book, "Web APIs: from Start to Finish". It is a fantastic overview for those just starting to dig into API development.

Wrap-Up
That's it for this week's email. In addition to the links above you can always find useful REST API design advice at RESTAPITutorial.com. Thanks for reading and we'll be back in next week.

- Todd and Matthew