Honestly I've never been the biggest fan of the original API Design book from the same author, because I didn't quite like the examples and weird language (grammatically correct, but very strange, abstract). So when I discovered that there is new one, I wasn't quite sure whether I should go for it.
This book is different though and I am glad that I bought it. It's much shorter (I read it during my subway rides to the work in two weeks or so) and chapters are great mixture of comprehensiveness and brevity. Each chapter introduces an interesting paradox of API design and it's described in the way you probably haven't thought of yet. Some of these paradoxes where much more interesting for me (Coolness vs. Cost, Backward Compatibility, Callers and Providers, DSLs ...) than other ones, but I am sure that every developer will appreciate something else. But since it has 20 distinct chapters, you can just skip ones you're not quite interested in.
So compared to the previous one, I feel like this is an improvement. If you happen to be API designer, then it's no-brainer. If you happen to develop standard enterprise software then you probably have greater flexibility to redesign your APIs and you don't have to think so much about things like backwards compatibility etc. But I'd still say that information provided in this book would be useful to you.
I am giving it 4 out of 5 stars, because some of the weirdness from the original API Design book also leaked into this one, but note that this is very subjective opinion.
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