Welcome

Thank you for purchasing the MEAP of Designing APIs with Swagger and OpenAPI!

My name is Josh Ponelat ( Pah-neh-lat ) and I have the privilege of introducing you to the world of OpenAPI and Swagger. The eco-systems that surround RESTful APIs and the sheer joy of leveraging and automating those systems.

The goal of this book is to teach the fundamentals of describing APIs using OpenAPI, and how those descriptions can be used to drive parts of your work flows and pipelines with tooling, such as those prefixed with Swagger.

Within you'll find out how to read and write OpenAPI definitions, where writing consists of describing existing or new RESTful APIs. We'll disambiguate as much as we can, aiming to answer questions as to "why" something is the way it is. After literacy of OpenAPI, we'll dive into the design process. How to create new APIs cheaply and iterate on their design. And finally we'll look at some lovely advanced topics, including my favourite.. guidelines to building your own OpenAPI tooling.

OpenAPI and Swagger are both Open Source, and there are resources on the subjects online, but few books to capture just how they work and why they're so sorely needed today. While I've endeavoured to do just that, I'd like to ask for your help.

Please reach out in the liveBook's discussion forum and comments, the biggest help can come from silly questions, such as asking for clarity on a subject or even just asking why something happens to be that way.