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What is an API? Application programming interfaces explained

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Geekz Snow
What is an API? Application programming interfaces explained

API stands for application programming interface, a concept that applies everywhere from command-line tools to enterprise Java code to Ruby on Rails web apps.

Unless you write every single line of code from scratch, you’re going to be interacting with external software components, each with its own API.

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Its API would include information about what it can do—accelerate, brake, turn on the radio, etc.

The phrase “Twitter API,” for example, not only refers to the set of rules for programmatically interacting with Twitter, but is generally understood to mean the thing you interact with, as in “We’re doing analysis on the tweets we got from the Twitter API.”

When it comes to software, APIs are literally everywhere.

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Geekz Snow
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