--- title: APIs description: Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) enable different software systems to communicate and exchange data. Learners will understand RESTful architecture, request-response cycles, authentication methods, and how to integrate third-party services into their own applications. category: programming-tech subcategory: programming-fundamentals difficulty: beginner, intermediate, advanced url: /subject/apis --- # APIs Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) enable different software systems to communicate and exchange data. Learners will understand RESTful architecture, request-response cycles, authentication methods, and how to integrate third-party services into their own applications. ## Available Resources 1 Videos • 3 Books • 2 Courses • 4 Websites ## Websites ### 1. Public APIs Community-maintained GitHub index of several hundred free public APIs, sorted by category with authentication, HTTPS and CORS support noted for each entry. Useful for picking a real data source when building practice projects. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://github.com/public-apis/public-apis **Tags:** apis, open-data, rest, developer-tools, practice-projects ### 2. Postman Learning Center Official documentation and guided tutorials from Postman covering how to send requests, write test scripts, chain calls into collections, mock servers and document APIs. Working through it makes you competent with the tool most teams use. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://learning.postman.com/ **Tags:** apis, postman, api-testing, rest, developer-tools ### 3. REST API Tutorial Reference site explaining REST as Roy Fielding defined it: the six architectural constraints, resource and URI design, HTTP methods, status codes, HATEOAS and idempotency. Reading it lets you judge whether an API is genuinely RESTful. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://restfulapi.net/ **Tags:** rest, apis, http, api-design, web-architecture ### 4. MDN Web Docs MDN Web Docs is a comprehensive resource for learning and referencing web technologies, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Web APIs. It offers tutorials, guides, code examples, and debugging tips to help you build, test, and troubleshoot web applications. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://developer.mozilla.org **Tags:** html, css, javascript, web-apis, web-reference ## Videos ### 1. APIs for Beginners Two-hour freeCodeCamp course by Craig Dennis explaining what APIs are, how HTTP requests, endpoints, headers and JSON work, then building small projects in Node.js and Flask against a real third-party API. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZvSYJDk-us **Tags:** apis, http, json, nodejs, python ## Courses ### 1. REST APIs with Flask and Python Build REST APIs with Flask and Python! Learn to design, develop, and deploy robust APIs with expert Jose Salvatierra. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.udemy.com/course/rest-api-flask-and-python/ **Tags:** rest-api, flask, python, backend, api-design ### 2. APIs and Microservices Learn APIs & Microservices with this free course! Build robust backends and master API design with freeCodeCamp. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.freecodecamp.org/learn/apis-and-microservices/ **Tags:** rest-api, nodejs, express, microservices, backend ## Books ### 1. RESTful Web APIs **Author:** Leonard Richardson, Mike Amundsen, Sam Ruby O'Reilly guide to hypermedia-driven API design, covering representation formats, link relations, profiles, and the semantic gap between clients and servers. After reading it you can design services that evolve without breaking existing consumers. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/1449358063?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** books, technology-computer-science, programming-fundamentals ### 2. Designing Web APIs **Author:** Brenda Jin, Saurabh Sahni, Amir Shevat Practical O'Reilly book on planning, versioning, securing, and operating a public web API, with case studies from Slack, Stripe, and GitHub. Readers come away able to make concrete design and lifecycle decisions for their own API. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/1492026921?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** books, technology-computer-science, programming-fundamentals ### 3. API Design Patterns **Author:** JJ Geewax Manning catalogue of resource-oriented patterns drawn from Google's API standards: naming, pagination, partial updates, long-running operations, and batching. Working through it leaves you able to apply consistent conventions across a large internal or public API surface. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/161729585X?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** books, technology-computer-science, programming-fundamentals --- *This content is part of Dantes.io - Your Treasure Map to Knowledge* *Curated by humans at Dantes.io. Personal study use welcome; republishing this curation requires permission (team@dantes.io).* View this page online: https://dantes.io/subject/apis