UBC Library and Archives

Demystifying APIs Garnett, Alex

Description

When you hear people talking about how they’re getting data from this API or that API, do you ever thinking to yourself: “Well, I’m not a programmer per se, but people toss that word around like ‘dark, leafy greens’ or ‘neoliberalism’ these days, so how hard could it be, really?” Good news! The answer is “not very hard, and particularly not very hard if you noticed that I used nested-apostrophes-as-quote-marks in the first sentence of this abstract!” This talk will provide a brief, hands-on overview of interacting with various APIs using a command-line terminal. No prior knowledge of programming is required; only a willingness to learn about fun things like shell scripts and HTTP methods and POSIX environments. In exchange, you’ll hopefully learn a thing or two about how people create Twitter clients and query databases and other useful ways of using the internet that don’t involve a web browser.

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Rights

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada