Aug
31
2006
How to Design a Good API and Why it Matters
Posted by: Sergey Chernyshev in API, PDF, SlidesPresentation by Joshua Bloch, Google Inc. (Sun previously, author of Effective Java) at Library-Centric Software Design LCSD’05 on Sunday, October 16, 2005 (slides in PDF)
Interesting quotes:
- Public APIs are forever - one chance to get it right
- Good code is modular–each module has an API
- Thinking in terms of APIs improves code quality
- Easy to use, even without documentation
- Don’t let implementation details “leak” into API
- Make classes and members as private as possible
- and more …
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October 13th, 2006 at 4:04 pm
I’m no geek so I couldn’t follow this presentation but I do work in the UK in presentation skills training, so I was interested in the presentation itself.
It’s good. Okay, it’s too long and it uses far too many bullet-points so that I’ll bet at least some of the audience lost the will to live before the end, but those are minor crimes compared to the two big things it had going for it.
Firstly, the passion for the subject showed!
Secondly… almost more importantly…. the structure was flagged up for me almost all the time: as a reader (listener) I knew where I was in the presentation. Even though I didn’t understand the individual points on the slides, I understood what each slide was doing. That’s great, because if a non-specialist like me can do that, people in a specialist audience, who do understand the jargon, are going to be able to concentrate on the *content* rather than the *structure*.
That means understanding and retention both to up.
Big plus points to the author: if only more technical presentations were written this way!