The Programming Historian has published Patrick Smyth’s (CUNY) new tutorial on creating web APIs. The guide aims to teach users how to make their data more accessible. The goals of the lesson are to:
- Learn what an API is and when you should use one.
- Learn how to build a web API that returns data to its users.
- Learn some principles of good API design, applying them to an API that draws book metadata from a database.
The tutorial also includes examples of APIs for humanities researchers and a discussion of creating APIs from a user perspective.
dh+lib Review
This post was produced through a cooperation among Erica Hayes, Matt Huculak, Colette Hayes, and Amber D'Ambrosio (Editors-at-large for the week), Sarah Melton (Editor for the week), and Caitlin Christian-Lamb, Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara, Roxanne Shirazi, and Patrick Williams (dh+lib Review Editors).