What this book covers

Chapter 1, Getting Started, provides a quick start to get everything set up locally for development.

Chapter 2, What We’ll Build, provides an overview of an API in general, and how to use it to decouple a frontend and backend system.

Chapter 3, Implementing with REST, provides an overview of best practices and an opinionated design for general API development that is used throughout the industry.

Chapter 4, Documentation with Swagger, shows you how to enable and surface documentation based on Swagger.

Chapter 5, Data Validation, provides an overview of how to validate API calls, including custom validation with a widely used library.

Chapter 6, Azure Functions, provides an alternative cloud-first hosting framework that not only can be used for APIs but also as a starting point for much more. It also illustrates best practices and then builds upon them to allow runtime configuration without redeployment.

Chapter 7, Azure Durable Functions, provides an overview of the simplification that results when following a few small design rules in a stateful, scalable system.

Chapter 8, Advanced Topics, provides a straightforward, cost-effective, cloud logging implementation. Additionally, it goes over advanced scenarios such as complex object mapping, an opinionated cloud-first design tool, and the creation and use of storage tables.

Chapter 9, Authentication and Authorization, provides an out-of-the-box solution for cloud-first authentication scenarios, including authorizing Azure and non-Azure clients.

Chapter 10, Deploying to Azure, gets you set up quickly to iterate with Continuous Delivery and Continuous Integration (CI/CD) pipelines.

Chapter 11, What’s Next?, gives you practical advice on the classic question: Now what?