Opeyemi Obembe is the co-founder and CTO of Callbase.co, a web application that lets you set up a call centre in a very short time. A few weeks ago, he announced that he had started work on a book titled ‘Consuming REST APIs – a soft introduction.’ And now, he has released it.
Ope wrote, about the book, on his Gumroad page, “This book introduces REST APIs in a simple way. It shows how web applications make data available via their respective APIs and how easy it is to use them.” The book is 79 pages long and is available for free download.
He further explained that “APIs detail data interaction between applications. On the web, you can use APIs to request data from or send data to any of the platforms that support them. Consequently, you can use APIs to extend services these platforms provide or build custom solutions on them, whether it is to download all pictures you’ve liked on Instagram, add the birthdays of your Facebook friends to your Google Calendar or listen to the Twitter stream for tweets containing the words ‘discount’ or ‘coupon’.”
When I asked Ope what inspired him to write the book, he said, “I’ve always loved APIs. The many ways one can leverage existing platforms to build custom solutions can be very interesting. The other day I wanted to save real time tweets about something. All I had to do was write a quick script to connect to Twitter’s public stream for it. It’s even more interesting how you can build mashups from different platforms, e.g download all Instagram pictures with the tag #siezethebae to my Dropbox account. Many developers don’t see these possibilities. Some see it as a hard curve. It really shouldn’t be.”
He admitted that writing a book is not easy. He started writing over a year ago but stopped after a few weeks. Why? Because “there is just so much to do – proof read like a hundred times, get people to review, rewrite sections because you think it’s not good enough, and so much more. I picked it up some 2 months ago and even though I’ve tried to commit to it everyday, there were many days I missed it.”
He said that the aim of writing the book is “to help people get into [REST] API development in an easy way. What I’ve tried to do is to explore consuming REST APIs in a very simple way, using very real world examples, avoiding big and confusing concepts and breaking down things that seem so difficult. REST follows a structure. The implementation across the various platforms are very similar. It’s really not hard if you know what to do.”
