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Andrew McCormick
17,730 PointsFuture Treehouse Projects
I think it would be great to have a series of articles or a project about how to learn a new API. Maybe it's just a mental block for me, but I have a hard time understanding how to use an API that I'm familiar with. For instance, I want to integrate with Quickbooks. Quickbooks has a web API. They say I can use PHP. I think "great, I know PHP fairly well". However I look through the documentation and it seems all greek to me. I feel this way when I look at most APIs. I don't know if this can be done, but just something about how to approach learning a new API.
4 Answers
Ben Jakuben
Treehouse TeacherThat's something we've talked about. We are going to teach how to consume certain APIs in upcoming some of our projects (like the next Android and iPhone apps), but the general idea of how to discover, learn, and utilize an API is super important.
If anyone sees this thread and has examples of good or bad APIs to learn, paste it in here for reference!
James Barnett
39,199 PointsThe most user friendly APIs are the RESTful ones that take JSON, you can then write a quick script (bash, python, ruby) and scripting interactions. Most RESTful APIs return data as either JSON or XML.
Some of my favorites include:
Nicholas Wimsatt
Courses Plus Student 1,086 PointsAPI is a broad topic to explore, but I would like to see courses in social media API like Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter.
Ben Jakuben
Treehouse TeacherTwitter is a good one to learn from since the basics are easy to understand and implement. If only their policies about them weren't so bad...
YouTube has an interesting set. They're a little more complex in terms of the data that's returned, but that's a good thing for learning. They're documented pretty well, too.