Summary

We’ve come to the end of this course. But really, we’ve come to the beginning. As we learned from Donald Norman, we’re all engaged in our own action cycle, constantly looping between our goals and the world, crossing the bridges of execution and evaluation. Just like the web itself, we’re living out our lives in a repeating request-parse-wait loop and, with each cycle, we get to learn something new.

We hope this course has been a positive learning experience for you. The work of organizing our accumulated experiences and practices together in one place turned out to be a bigger project than expected and, at times, seemed to take on a life of its own. The resulting content between these lessons covers quite a bit of ground. So much that it’s worth it to briefly touch on the highlights before we finish.

Getting started

We started the course by visiting some important foundational concepts that can help us make sense of the way web APIs look and feel, along with how we can use the current technology to create them. We saw that APIs are meant to solve real business problems. Creating an API for the sake of creating an API isn’t enough. It’s important, as Kas Thomas says, to determine what our users expect to be able to do with APIs. ...