2 The Anatomy of Web APIs
Most of what the average user knows about a web application comes from what they can see and click in the graphical user interface (GUI) of their web browser. Under the hood, APIs perform much of the work. In particular, web APIs provide a way for applications to use the functionality and data of other applications over HTTP to feed a web application GUI with images, text, and videos.
This chapter covers common API terminology, types, data interchange formats, and authentication methods and then ties this information together with an example: observing the requests and responses exchanged during interactions with ...
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