APIs that nail it
SwellJoe: Both Perl and Python have web libraries that have always seemed close to perfect to me.As an example, a few days ago a friend of mine was trying to figure out how to tell people within her organization how to find the "canonical" URL from a request (the URL that the browser ended up at after possibly numerous 30x redirects) without having to actually go there with a browser, and after I'd suggested wget...she came back with, "Can it be done in Python?  Everybody already has that installed."  In about 90 seconds, I was able to whip up a couple of lines that did the job, and an example of doing it from the Python REPL.  So, urllib2 is surprisingly powerful and clean.Perl has LWP::Simple, which is similarly awesome.Google Checkout, IMHO, is a great example of what not to do, while PayPal manages to provide similar services in a much more coherent fashion.  (I think it's particularly sad that Google had the opportunity to learn from people who'd come before...and they still managed to make a worse API.)