March 2025
Intermediate to advanced
352 pages
8h 51m
English
Content preview from Hands-On APIs for AI and Data Science
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Chapter 5. Documenting Your API
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.
Brenda Jin, Saurabh Sahni, and Amir Shevat, 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 SportsWorldCentral (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 job of your API docs is to signal trust to potential API consumers. If they don’t trust you, they won’t use your API. If API consumers are going to call your API multiple times, they will build an integration, which is basically code that calls your code repeatedly. For the SWC API, this might be a fantasy advice website that will be adding SWC to its list of supported websites. Another example would be a data science user who is going to schedule an Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) process to get the latest stats every week.
These repeat users are asking the following when they ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.