81: What is an API?

A Question of Code

Development (and web-dev in particular) is a field full of initialisms and acronyms. We often take them for granted without thinking too much about these things that we use every day. This week we dive into one of the most common TLIs (Three Letter Initialisms) that all web developers will encounter sooner or later: APIs (also known as Application Programming Interfaces).

How well do we know our TLIs? How (and why) might you scrape data from a web page? And why would using an API be preferable? And when should you take the time to learn APIs? Find out all this and more in this week's application-interfacing instalment of A Question of Code.

Mentioned in this episode:

• SWAPI (the Star Wars API)
• httpstatuses.com
• Postman