Web API Development for the Absolute Beginner

If you are a developer who wants to learn the basic skills of web and application programming interfaces (APIs) with .NET, this book is your complete introduction. The book takes a learn-by-experience approach. You will hit the ground running with a sample project that has everything you need to be wired up.

As you follow along, you will learn simple and intuitive conventions that will free you from some of the more tedious decisions and work, in order to allow you to focus on the business requirements required by your team. Certain components of the framework should always appear in certain folders in the solution to speed up development while others need a name that follows particular conventions. You will learn the building blocks of Web API and how to leverage them to have a well-rounded API. Understanding these small but important tricks will make development faster, easier, and more pleasant, and will prevent time-consuming errors.

Part I introduces you to the basics of Web. Part II gets you started creating an API that you will use and build upon throughout the book until you have a complete project. All companion code is available via GitHub. Part III covers more advanced concepts, including how to override out-of-the-box conventions to customize an API to meet your specific business needs. By the end of the book you will have a fully functional API, and you will be better prepared for an interview for a .NET backend developer job.

What You Will Learn

• Build a start-to-finish Web API
• Know the main concepts of the Web
• Apply best practices in API development to your own projects
• Know the fundamentals of Web API development
• Know the fundamentals of a RESTful API
• Leverage Web API constructs to implement a clean and extensible API
• Get hands-on experience to unit test a Web API
• Gain the skills required to apply for a junior or entry-level .NET Web developer job

Who This Book Is For

Developers who want to learn API development with .NET. It is helpful to have some basic C# programming knowledge because it is used in API development in .NET, but it is not mandatory. Readers should be familiar with a programming language to be able to understand code and examples. Experience with web development is not necessary.