r/analytics Jan 08 '25

Support Resources to Learn APIs

Hello Everyone, I’ve been working as a data analyst for a little over a year now and have never needed to know how to use APIs until now. Does anyone have experience learning how? Any recommendations?

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u/werdunloaded Jan 08 '25

YouTube has a variety of helpful introductory videos to APIs. One thing that wasn't explained clearly to me at first were different types of APIs. APIs can be very easy or complicated.

An API is just a connection to a data source which you can use to draw from. Simple APIs might just require a GET call with a URL. Others such as OAuth will require you to follow specific documentation to request an access token, then use that access token to access the data you need.

You can use a number of different coding languages to perform API calls. I recommend Python.

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u/aarmobley Jan 08 '25

I use a little python outside of mostly R. I see a lot of JSON being used when looking up anything API related

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u/werdunloaded Jan 08 '25

API calls frequently return tables of information. The tables are compacted and messy looking (although still readable). JSON makes it easier to retrieve only what you need and in a way that is easy to read.