Book excerpt: APIs are transforming the business world at an increasing pace. Gain the essential skills needed to quickly design, build, and deploy quality web APIs that are robust, reliable, and resilient. Go from initial design through prototyping and implementation to deployment of mission-critical APIs for your organization. Test, secure, and deploy your API with confidence and avoid the "release into production" panic. Tackle just about any API challenge with more than a dozen open-source utilities and common programming patterns you can apply right away. Good API design means starting with the API-First principle - understanding who is using the API and what they want to do with it - and applying basic design skills to match customers' needs while solving business-critical problems. Use the Sketch-Design-Build method to create reliable and scalable web APIs quickly and easily without a lot of risk to the day-to-day business operations. Create clear sequence diagrams, accurate specifications, and machine-readable API descriptions all reviewed, tested, and ready to turn into fully-functional NodeJS code. Create reliable test collections with Postman and implement proper identity and access control security with AuthO-without added cost or risk to the company. Deploy all of this to Heroku using a continuous delivery approach that pushes secure, well-tested code to your public servers ready for use by both internal and external developers. From design to code to test to deployment, unlock hidden business value and release stable and scalable web APIs that meet customer needs and solve important business problems in a consistent and reliable manner.