Application Programming Interfaces

You’ll find a lot of definitions of APIs online that’ll leave you confused. They’ll be accurate and comprehensive, but you won’t really get what an API is at the end. This lesson is nothing like that. So, here’s our (very simple) definition of an API for the front-end dev: An API, or Application Programming Interface, is an interface, like a link, from which you can get access to data, software, or hardware to use in your website or app in a meaningful way.

Here’s an example where we use GitHub’s API to get information about a certain public repository. Note that it returns data such as the owner’s avatar, creation date, and description in JSON format.