How to Design a Good API and Why it Matters

Joshua Bloch, Principal Software Engineer at Google was the keynote speaker at Library-Centric Software Design workshop last October: his topic focused on API design and why good design matters [PDF]. His presentation is pretty matter of fact, clear-cut, and speaks to developers. Good API design does really matter, because once an API has been released for consumption, modifications become an increasingly difficult task over time. Making sure the design is good up front then, would be a very good thing to do. Bloch offers realistic advise for developers, on how to go about designing good APIs -- not just the technical stuff either, but also the soft and more important advise, as the technical minded usually gets caught this most unexpected trap.

Another good read from the workshop: Libraries and their Reuse: Entropy, Kolmogorov complexity, and Zipf's Law, by Todd Veldhuizen of Open Systems Laboratory [PDF].

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