{"id":6459,"date":"2020-11-08T18:11:00","date_gmt":"2020-11-09T02:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/careerkarma.com\/blog\/?p=6459"},"modified":"2020-11-09T00:29:48","modified_gmt":"2020-11-09T08:29:48","slug":"what-is-an-api","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/careerkarma.com\/blog\/what-is-an-api\/","title":{"rendered":"API: Courses, Training, and Other Resources"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

How to Learn About APIs<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

If you\u2019ve ever worked on a coding project that grew to any size, you know it doesn\u2019t take that long for it to become impossible for any single person to know all its inner workings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In order to deal with the cognitive limitations of human beings, it becomes necessary to divide the project up into individual components which are developed semi-independently of each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As this process continues the teams working on each component begin to develop their own workflows, code bases, and dynamics. At the extreme, it can become difficult for the various components to work together smoothly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet, if the overall project is to be a success this is precisely what has to happen. Having great backend and front end<\/a> code written doesn\u2019t do any good if none of it fits together. So how do we get everything to coordinate? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is a deep question with a deep answer, but today we\u2019re going to focus on just one piece of technology that helps make the modern world of technology possible: Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you\u2019re looking to get into a technology career<\/a> of any kind, knowing how APIs work is going to be an advantage. They are used all over the place for solving problems of almost every kind. \n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is an API?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

An Application Programming Interface (API) is a protocol that lets two or more web services connect with each other. APIs define what data a service owns can be retrieved and manipulated by another service. Companies rely on APIs to let developers build on top of their services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As it turns out, communication isn\u2019t just essential in establishing healthy relationships between human beings. It\u2019s no less important in making sure chunks of code get along. In the introduction I tried to set up my discussion of APIs by noting that within single projects complexity can cross a threshold beyond which there must be established rules for how one component talks to another. Well, the exact same thing is true at a much higher level between<\/em> projects. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what we have is a situation in which there needs to be layers both inside and outside a given project whose entire purpose is to make it so that someone can talk to the project\u2019s software in a clear, rule-based way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that\u2019s what an API is. One popular example of an API is code which enables you to grab the contents of a web page (I describe just such an API below), but they come in many more shapes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Twitter has multiple APIs for accessing its database of tweets, which let you do things like search for specific hashtags. SERPapi is a 3rd-party resource that lets you grab Google search results in a JSON object; it returns date time information, text snippets, titles, links, and pretty much everything else Google would. I could write an entire article just expanding this list. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why Use an API? <\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I want to start answering this question by first drilling down into an example which is similar to my first experience with an API. \n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Imagine you\u2019d like to grab the headlines, contents, and metadata for all the articles published by the New York Times in the past 5 years for natural language processing. If you couldn\u2019t do any clever programming, how would you do this? \n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You\u2019d probably have to set aside a week to spend all your time going backwards through the New York Times\u2019 website, painstakingly copying out the data you need by hand into some kind of database. \n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Can you conceive of a more ridiculous waste of time? \n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Luckily, like almost all major websites, media outlets, applications, and software, the New York Times has an API which lets you accomplish this very thing in much less time. If I recall correctly, it took me a few hours of fiddling to get years worth of text data. \n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With this story having been relayed I doubt much else needs to be said. You use an API for the same reason you use a keyboard or a wheelbarrow or an atlatl: it makes your life easier. \n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why Build an API?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

And we\u2019ve also gone most of the way towards answering the question from the other side. While I doubt the New York Times cares all that much about whether a fledgling data scientist saves time gathering their articles together. But most other application developers don\u2019t have much choice. If they want their product to be used and integrated with other applications, they have to make an API to facilitate that process. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there are subtler reasons. It sometimes winds up being possible to utilize applications through APIs in surprising ways that even the developers didn\u2019t foresee. The famous automation platform If This Then That (IFTTT) is basically nothing but a way of lashing together hundreds of APIs to make it possible to do things like automatically email your spouse when you\u2019re still logged into your work machine after a certain time or send out a tweet every time you bookmark an article. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Famously, Amazon began slicing their code up into smaller pieces that became exposed through APIs, which paved the way for what would later become Amazon Web Services, the most powerful cloud-computing service in the word. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Learning APIs<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before you can go on to use complicated web APIs, you first need to know the principles upon which APIs are based. These principles will aid your understanding of what information you can retrieve and manipulate with an API. It is also these principles that guide how<\/em> you get information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How Long Does it Take to Learn APIs?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

It takes a few hours to learn the fundamental concepts behind APIs. This is because the architecture behind APIs is relatively simple if you have a good understanding of the web. You may end up spending days or weeks learning an individual API and what you can do with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let’s take the Twitter API. You could spend days looking through documentation to find all the API endpoints you need for a project. Every API has their own endpoints, authentication mechanisms, and schemas which you’ll need to learn to use that API.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How to Learn APIs: Step-by-Step<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

How do I learn to use APIs? That’s a great question. The first step is to ask yourself why you want to learn about APIs. This will help keep you motivated even as you encounter challenges which all web developers do when they first start to use APIs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n