What is exactly API and why we call it like that? I am learning web development, and always come across APIs. I would love to learn it through an analogy.
In: Engineering
It’s the interface to a lot of functionality.
Think of your car. It has a million parts and a LOT going on.
But you don’t care about those million parts. You care about the layer between you and that complexity.
So to you, you have “start the car” as an option. Push the gas, the brake, turn left or right, maybe go in reverse.
Those controls are your API. They let you control the complexity of a car without knowing anything at all about how the car actually works.
In tech it’s the same thing. You don’t need to know how google works, because you can call an API that just says “search” or “get map of location x,y” or “send this email” or whatever. That layer that lets you use those functions is the API.
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