The Complete Practical Guide

Read before you buy: the PDF here is a free sample — the first 20 pages of the 504-page book (payments, sales and reviews on this demo site are sample data). Get the full e-book at thenexbooks on Gumroad.

Your API has a new kind of user.

Today's APIs are called by web apps, mobile apps, partner integrations — and AI agents that read your schema, choose operations, and act on behalf of users. GraphQL's typed, self-describing, introspectable schema makes it the ideal API language for all of them.

This book takes you from your first query to a federated, production-grade, agent-ready graph.

• 504 pages · 28 chapters + 4 appendices
• Schema design that ages well: pagination, errors as data, evolution, deprecation
• A dedicated deep dive on designing schemas for AI agents, tool calling, and MCP
• Servers in TypeScript (GraphQL Yoga) plus Java, Python, Go, and .NET
• Performance with DataLoader, security limits, caching, and persisted operations
• Subscriptions, SSE, @defer/@stream, federation, testing, and observability
• 3 complete case studies, including an agent-ready SaaS API

WHO IT IS FOR
Backend, frontend, and mobile developers, API architects, and AI engineers who connect LLM agents to real systems.

FORMAT
PDF (A4), 504 pages, English, clickable table of contents and PDF bookmarks. 1st Edition, 2026.

What you will learn

• Ch 1 · Why GraphQL: The API Language for Humans and Agents
• Ch 2 · Core Concepts: Operations, Fields, and the Graph
• Ch 3 · The Type System and SDL
• Ch 4 · Querying in Depth: Arguments, Variables, Aliases, Fragments, Directives
• Ch 5 · Mutations and Input Design
• Ch 6 · Inside the Spec: Validation, Execution, Introspection, and Responses
• Ch 7 · Schema Design Principles
• Ch 8 · Pagination, Filtering, and Sorting
• Ch 9 · Errors as Data: Designing Failure
• Ch 10 · Schema Evolution, Deprecation, and Versioning
• Ch 11 · Designing Schemas for AI Agents
• Ch 12 · Building Your First Server (TypeScript, GraphQL Yoga)
• Ch 13 · Resolvers, Context, and the Execution Model
• Ch 14 · GraphQL Beyond JavaScript: Java, Python, Go, and .NET
• Ch 15 · The N+1 Problem, DataLoader, and Server Performance
• Ch 16 · Authentication and Authorization
• Ch 17 · Real-Time GraphQL: Subscriptions, SSE, @defer and @stream
• Ch 18 · Custom Scalars, Directives, and File Uploads
• Ch 19 · GraphQL Clients: From fetch to Apollo Client, urql, and Relay
• Ch 20 · Caching: Client, HTTP, CDN, and Persisted Operations
• Ch 21 · Code Generation and End-to-End Type Safety
• Ch 22 · Securing GraphQL APIs
• Ch 23 · Testing, Observability, and Schema Governance
• Ch 24 · Federation and Distributed Graphs
• Ch 25 · GraphQL for AI Agents in Practice: Tools, MCP, and Guardrails
• Ch 26 · Case Study: The Orbit Store Commerce API
• Ch 27 · Case Study: Migrating from REST to GraphQL
• Ch 28 · Case Study: Building an Agent-Ready SaaS API

Book details