A friend recently asked if I had any recommended reading on designing APIs in general. I found some time today to dig through my Pinboard, and these are the relevant links I found.

Many/most of them are language- or technology-specific, but I think it’s useful to read through all of them. You’ll come away with useful ideas that you can apply in any language or framework.

• Best Practices for Designing a Pragmatic RESTful API by Vinay Sahni
• API Design by Matt Gammell
• Functional options for friendly APIs by Dave Cheney
• Using @autoclosure when designing Swift APIs by John Sundell
• SE-0117, API Design, and You by Eli Perkins
• Library-Oriented Programming - talk by Justin Spahr-Summers at #Pragma Conference 2015

And two links on designing asynchronous APIs specifically:

• Designing APIs for Asynchrony by Isaac Z. Schlueter
• Callbacks, synchronous and asynchronous by Havoc Pennington

As always, I welcome discussion and feedback; I’m @cdzombak on Twitter.