By Gergely Orosz, the author of The Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter and Building Mobile Apps at Scale
Navigating senior, tech lead, staff and principal positions at tech companies and startups. An Amazon #1 Best Seller. New: the hardcover is out! As is the audibook. Now available in 6 languages.
Look for recent blocks or quarantined items matching the game folder or steam_api.dll . Click the entry, choose , and select Restore . How to Exclude the Game Folder:
If the file was corrupted or deleted during a system crash or an interrupted update, Steam can automatically scan and replace it. Open your library.
Steam will now scan all of the game's files. If steam_api.dll is missing or corrupted, Steam will automatically re-download a clean, official copy.
Try the following solutions to resolve the "cannot create steam-api.dll" error:
Here are the most effective steps to fix this error, starting with the most likely culprits. 1. Restore the File from Antivirus Quarantine
typically happens when your antivirus mistakenly flags the file as a threat and quarantines or deletes it. This file is essential for the game to communicate with Steam features like achievements and multiplayer servers. 1. Check Antivirus Quarantine
Because of this, legitimate users often encounter the error because their AV software is too aggressive. It sees a file named steam-api.dll attempting to interact with a network connection and flags it based on the reputation of the file hash. If a legitimate user has ever accidentally downloaded a repack or a mod that included a modified .dll , their AV may "blacklist" that filename path, causing headaches for legitimate installations later on.
How to Fix "Black Ops 2 Cannot Create steam_api.dll" Error Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 remains a beloved title in the franchise, but players running it on modern Windows systems often encounter frustrating launch errors. A common issue is the error, which stops the game from starting entirely.
Right-click the on your desktop (or find Steam.exe in C:/Program Files (x86)/Steam ). Select Run as administrator .
Most users find that their antivirus (like Avast, AVG, or Windows Defender) has "quarantined" the file. Check Quarantine:
The book is separated into six standalone parts, each part covering several chapters:
Parts 1 and 6 apply to all engineering levels: from entry-level software developers to principal or above engineers. Parts 2, 3, 4 and 5 cover increasingly senior engineering levels. These four parts group topics in chapters – such as ones on software engineering, collaboration, getting things done, and so on.
This book is more of a reference book that you can refer back to, as you grow in your career. I suggest skimming over the career levels and chapters that you are familiar with, and focus reading on topics you struggle with, or career levels where you are aiming to get to. Keep in mind that expectations can vary greatly between companies.
In this book, I’ve aimed to align the topics and leveling definitions closer to what is typical at Big Tech and scaleups: but you might find some of the topics relevant for lower career levels in later chapters. For example, we cover logging, montiroing and oncall in Part 5: “Reliable software systems” in-depth: but it’s useful – and oftentimes necessary! – to know about these practices below the staff engineer levels.
The Software Engineer's Guidebook is available in multiple languages:
You should now be able to ask your local book shops to order the book for you via Ingram Spark Print-on-demand - using the ISBN code 9789083381824. I'm also working on making the paperback more accessible in additional regions, including translated versions. Please share details here if you're unable to get the book in your country and I'll aim to remedy the situation.
I'd like to think so! The book can help you get ideas on how to help software engineers on your team grow. And if you are a hands-on engineering manager (which I hope you might be!) then you can apply the topics yourself! I wrote more about staying hands-on as an engineering manager or lead in The Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter.
I've gotten this variation of a question from Data Engineers, ML Engineers, designers and SREs. See the more detailed table of contents and the "Look inside" sample to get a better idea of the contents of the book. I have written this book with software engineers as the target group, and the bulk of the book applies for them. Part 1 is more generally applicable career advice: but that's still smaller subset of the book.