this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2024
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CS Career Questions

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Resources for RESTful API Integration practice? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I’m doing interviews for companies that would involve API integrations. I’ve done a couple now where I was given some general API information (some intentionally unclear, some more clear) and I felt I didn’t do well. Mainly I was nervous, and felt very pressured just to understand how the different parts of the APIs interact with each other and should be interacted with. This is despite doing this for work and myself not feeling as nervous doing more common coding tests which I don’t do as much at work(thanks to doing examples on hackerrank, Leetcode helping me feel more comfortable).

So what are the resources I should leverage to practice API integrations? How should I go about practicing? Especially considering that I do need to perform in a certain way during interviews.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Restful API is an approach that is very open to interpretations and mistakes. Meaning, there's nothing that forces a given api to be restful unless the devs were able to do it correctly. Even then, most apis are not expected to be used without thorough documentation.

To practice I would suggest:

Go over the principles of RESTful and try to understand http better ( verbs, request and response structure, headers etc...

There are many free to use apis across the web. Pick any of them, read the docs and try creating a programmatic workflow with that api. It can anything - minimal ui to help uaer interact with it or some background service that talks to the api etc.

Be sure to check the ebtitiea docs as well.

Last thing, it is fairly common to see swagger(openapi) and if the api does support it, it'll make it a lot easier-for you to understand it.

Good luck:)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Any suggestions good APIs to interact with? What do you mean by Ebtitiea doc? the documentation for the API is what I assume you meant to refer to? yeah swagger is a great recommendation of something I need to get more familiar with.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You can try this list: https://github.com/public-apis/public-apis?tab=readme-ov-file

You can even use multiple APIs in a single app if the APIs you want to use are too simple(or for any other reason).

Sorry that was a typo. I meant to write 'entities' as in api entities which are crucial to describe the structure of the requests and responses.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Thanks I'll check it out!