When it comes to ensuring I keep up good practises, I try to look at books  in areas I think I have a good handle on such as APIs.  Why?  well it confirms and validates I’m upto date; sometimes another view point can spark ideas on how to make something better, improve an approach or simply understand another way of explaining an idea.  The later is important as the key benefit of knowing something is the opportunity to help someone else. Not everyone communicates or understands ideas in the same so this is always helpful.

So recently I ran through James Higginbotham’s Designing Great Web API’s book(let).  Often when goping through a book I mindmap it so that I can share it, and refer to it as a lit of prompts reminders if necessary.  Whilst’s James’ book doesnt  reveal anything new or relevatory for anyone working with APIs it does provide a good succinct explination to  basic practises. So here is the mindmap:

You can also access my MapWise view here. James’ book can be obtained freely from O’Reilly here.

The book doesn’t go into the depth of details for practises that Apiary (Pro Edition) offers with style guidelines which will describe morec detailed recommended practises (more here).