API for Product Managers 101 ( Year 2023 )

Discover how an api, a mutual contract enabling client-server request-response, uses keys and headers to securely connect services like banking, maps, and login via third-party apis.

discover three ways to utilize APIs: build an internal API, integrate external third-party APIs, and expose your API to customers, highlighting advantages and risks with examples like Google Maps API.

Explore how XML and JSON serve as data formats for API calls, with examples of XML tags and JSON objects, and introduce REST and SOAP for data exchange.

Explore SOAP and REST APIs, contrasting Simple Object Access Protocol with Representational State Transfer, and learn REST constraints like uniform interface, client–server, statelessness, cacheability, layered systems, and on-demand services.

Explore how HTTP request and response work for APIs, explain GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE operations, and illustrate with a weather API example showing request parameters, endpoints, and JSON responses.

Make API calls to trigger requests to endpoints and understand how payloads carry requests and responses, including headers, authentication, and authorization.

Learn how headers affect requests and responses—covering host, content-type and optional fields—and how authentication and authorization control API access via usernames, passwords and access tokens.

Discover how API documentation describes endpoints, request and response formats, and the contracts guiding teams and third parties. Explore tools like Swagger and Slate that visualize and publish these docs.

Learn how http response codes indicate success or errors, and how endpoints define accessible API resources, with practical examples from Amazon and Spotify for testing and integration.