Introduction to the Course

Look at a general overview of the course as a whole.

We'll cover the following

Everyone likes indulging in cooking up mouthwatering meals and beverages from time to time. This fondness for tasty food has created a demand for platforms that can provide food recipes with a simple online search. To create an application that has an extensive amount of recipes, we would need a database of recipes that we can use to populate these applications. TheMealDB and TheCocktailDB APIs provide us with exactly that kind of data. In this course, we’ll learn how to use these two APIs.

What is an API?

An API is a software gateway that allows different software components to communicate with each other. It helps expose the capabilities of an application to the outer world, allowing for programmatic access to the application's data.

Consider the case of a service like a food recipe application that provides us access to recipes for different kinds of meals and drinks. Building and exposing an API for this service will allow others to fetch the data this service offers programmatically.

Many popular services like YouTube, Reddit, and Google Maps also provide APIs for extended use cases. These services allow authorized clients to access the resources provided by them.

This course is intended for individuals who want to learn how to use TheMealDB and TheCocktailDB APIs. In this context, you can be either one of the following: :

  • A beginner who is new to the world of APIs, and wants to learn their basic usage.
  • A professional who has ample experience working with other APIs and wants to explore these APIs as well.

Prerequisites

To get the most out of this course, you should be familiar with the following:

  • JavaScript and HTTP requests—we’ll access the APIs using HTTPS requests in JavaScript language.
  • React library—we’ll look at how these APIs can be integrated into a React application at the end of the course.