Hands-On APIs for AI and Data Science

Chapter 5. Documenting Your API

A Note for Early Release Readers

With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author’s raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles.

This will be the 5th chapter of the final book. The GitHub repo for this book is https://github.com/handsonapibook/apibook-part-one.

If you have comments about how we might improve the content and/or examples in this book, or if you notice missing material within this chapter, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

Documentation is where developers come to learn about your API. Whether you’re providing a simple README file or developing a full website for your developers, it is critical to clearly document how they can most effectively use your API.

Jin, Sahnni, Shevan, Designing Web APIs, O’Reilly, 2018

In Chapter 4, you created your first API to fulfill the user stories identified in Chapter 1. The primary users you developed these for are data science users and advice website providers. The API will enable them to create analytics products such as dashboards, charts, and models using the Sports World Central (SWC) fantasy data. Now you will create documentation to help them use your API. Documentation and features such as software development kits (SDKs) improve the developer experience (DX) for your technical users.

Sending a Signal of Trust

An important part of your API docs is ...