Practical techniques of API design that produce robust code for the long term

API Design for C++Martin Reddy

Martin Reddy draws from his experience on large scale, collaborative software projects to present patterns and practices that provide real value to individual developers as well as organizations. API Design for C++ explores often overlooked issues, both technical and non-technical, contributing to successful design decisions that product high quality, robust, and long-lived APIs. —Eric Gregory, Software Architect, Pixar Animation Studios

The design of application programming interfaces can affect the behavior, capabilities, stability, and ease of use of end-user applications. With this book, you will learn how to design a good API for large-scale long-term projects. With extensive C++ code to illustrate each concept, API Design for C++ covers all of the strategies of world-class API development. Martin Reddy draws on over fifteen years of experience in the software industry to offer in-depth discussions of interface design, documentation, testing, and the advanced topics of scripting and plug-in extensibility. Throughout, he focuses on various API styles and patterns that will allow you to produce elegant and durable libraries.

Features

• The only book that teaches the strategies of C++ API development, including design, versioning, documentation, testing, scripting, and extensibility.

• Extensive code examples illustrate each concept, with fully functional examples and working source code for experimentation available online.

• Covers various API styles and patterns with a focus on practical and efficient designs for large-scale long-term projects.

About the Author

Dr Martin Reddy is the founder and CEO of the software consultancy firm Code Reddy Inc. and co-author of Level of Detail for 3D Graphics.

Dr. Martin Reddy holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and has over 30 years of experience in the software industry. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the AAIA, and a Distinguished Member of the ACM. He has published 10 patents, over 40 professional articles, and 2 books. Martin was co-founder and CTO of the AI startup, PullString, where he oversaw the development of the company’s technology until it was acquired by Apple in 2019. While at Apple, Martin was a software architect responsible for the architecture and APIs of major components of the Siri virtual assistant. Before that, Dr. Reddy worked for 6 years at Pixar Animation Studios where he was a lead engineer for the studio’s in-house animation system. He worked on several Academy Award Winning and Nominated films, such as “Finding Nemo”, “The Incredibles”, “Cars”, “Ratatouille”, and “Wall-E”. He was also the hair model for Mr Incredible. Martin began his career at SRI International where he worked on a distributed 3D terrain visualization system and co-authored the geospatial functionality in the VRML and X3D ISO standards. Martin was awarded Alumnus of the Year by his alma mater, Strathclyde University.