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From time to time I need to work with web APIs. These normally allow computers to communicate online. But, it might be necessary for people to work with APIs to connect a business to a new service or to automate tasks.
Below are some articles that I found helpful while learning about APIs.
RESTful APIs are built on HTTP methods. It is important to understand what HTTP methods are so that you can understand how different technologies relate and build on each other. An HTTP method is part of an HTTP message, and some articles talk about methods in the section on messages. HTTP methods are sometimes called verbs.
Representational state transfer (REST) | Wikipedia
HTTP Request Messages | Wikipedia
HTTP Messages | Mozilla Developer Network
A journalist from The Markup wrote an introduction to APIs. In particular, the author focused on undocumented APIs. These are APIs from large companies which are available to the public but which are mostly used by the company itself.
One useful website mentioned was cURL Converter. This takes cURL commands as input and outputs web requests in a coding language such as Python or PowerShell. This is useful because the Developer Tools in Firefox and Chrome can capture and output a request as a cURL command. So, there is a way to go from a real request to working code in a few steps.
Finding Undocumented APIs | Inspect Element
Convert curl commands to code | cURL Converter
This short YouTube video gives an overview of the basic types of API requests (API architectural styles). You are most likely to encounter a RESTful API while interacting with a service. However, other types are used in specialized circumstances.
Top 6 Most Popular API Architecture Styles | ByteByteGo | YouTube
JSON Web Tokens (JWT) are often used by RESTful APIs to authenticate requests.
Introduction to JSON Web Tokens | jwt.io
One program I found useful was the Postman app. This allows you to build and store API templates in a graphical development environment. This helps people organize and test their API requests.
curl is a command-line tool that can be used to interact with web APIs. The command-line nature allows curl commands to be used in shell scripts like batch files or Bash scripts. Most operating systems come with a version of curl preinstalled.
If you need help with curl, try asking on Stack Overflow.
I prefer to use PowerShell for scripting. Here is the help article for the API cmdlet in PowerShell.
Invoke-RestMethod | Microsoft Learn
curl Alias in PowerShell | cURL
Created: Tuesday, July 18, 2023
Updated: Tuesday, July 18, 2023