Introduction to the Course

Most of us use different social media platforms in our day-to-day life for various reasons, whether it is to interact with our loved ones or get updates about the different things happening in the world.

Reddit is one of the most popular social media platforms, with billions of page visits every year. When compared to other social media forums, Reddit can be considered a news aggregation and discussion forum. Paired with its rating system, it can be beneficial for exploring a wide range of topics. Reddit users can create subreddits on different topics and can post, comment, and vote on those subreddits.

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 Reddit that provides social media features. Building an API will allow others to programmatically fetch the data this service offers, such as sharing different user posts from it.

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

What this course will offer

In this course, we'll explore a multitude of endpoints offered by the Reddit API and learn how to use them firsthand. At the end of this course, you'll have a solid understanding of the Reddit API and know how to implement it in real-world applications.

Course prerequisites

This course assumes that you have basic skills in JavaScript, Node JS, and React. This course is designed for developers that want to explore the Reddit API and use it in their applications.

What to expect from this course

In this course, you'll start with the Reddit API and explore different endpoints. You'll then explore other endpoints using the JavaScript wrapperA wrapper is a program that proxies or encapsulates another program to provide a different way of interacting with it. for the Reddit API (snoowrap).

By the end of this course, you'll be able to do the following tasks:

1. Use the API directly:

   1. Read posts and comments from different subreddits.

   2. Create a subreddit and submit a post to it.

   3. Comment and vote on posts.

2. Use the JavaScript wrapper snoowrap:

   1. Read and make posts and comments.

   2. Moderate posts.

   3. Create user flairs.

   4. Learn to develop a simple web application integrated with the Reddit API.