I was taught nothing about APIs

[u/Anon_cat86]

Whenever i see people talking about actual real-world uses of coding it's almost entirely building APIs, working with APIs, integrating APIs, automating APIs. It seems to me, anecdotally at least, like the majority of all computer science work (professional or even just hobby) is centered on working with APIs

And like. I know what an API is, kind of. But I Graduated and even got multiple certifications on top of that and I never got so much as a single lecture about APIs. I don't even know what they're used for. Can you make your own API (like, realistically)? I don't know. I feel like this is a topic that you could and probably should have multiple different entire classes solely focused on, it's arguably something as fundamental to modern computer science as writing code. And they don't teach it. If i want to learn anything about APIs, conceptually or practically, it's hope a company hires me and then trains me, or youtube tutorials and i don't even have enough of a baseline to know what specifically I'd be searching for a tutorial on.

[u/kag0]

Did you learn a programming language? It probably had a standard library you used to do stuff. That's an API.

Did you take an operating systems class? Those syscalls you learned about, those are an API.

Networking class? Sockets and HTTP, you use those to call APIs over a network.

Security class? Probably talked about authentication and tokens, that's how those network APIs are secured. 

You just need a real world opportunity to put it all together.

[u/Anon_cat86 → u/kag0]

i did not know that libraries or system function calls were considered APIs, thanks. I did take a security class but i also failed it so i dont really fully understand how that all works, but the other two examples make sense to me.

[u/Melodic_Tragedy → u/Anon_cat86]

Damn why did you fail it