Chapter 10 Overview

At this point, it should be clear that designing and writing good programs is not only fun and interesting, but also intellectually demanding and time-consuming. As we mentioned in Chapter 1, the time-consuming nature of programming is one factor that has led to the software crisis. In this chapter, we introduce the concept of an application programmer interface, or API. Using an API is one way that professional programmers reduce the time and cost of producing software. Essentially, an API provides a set of basic building blocks, or infrastructure, for constructing particular kinds of programs. Rather than building each program from scratch, the programmer uses facilities provided by the API when possible. Properly designed APIs can significantly reduce the effort to construct complicated programs. Indeed, most commercial software is constructed using a variety of APIs. To illustrate the use of an API, we introduce an API for displaying simple graphical objects in a window. The EzWindows API is an object-oriented API that provides facilities for building programs that use a windowing system for input and output. Using the EzWindows API, we will be able to build good programs that look good too!

2002 McGraw-Hill Higher Education
Any use is subject to the Terms of Use and Privacy Notice.
McGraw-Hill Higher Education is one of the many fine businesses of The McGraw-Hill Companies.