Introduction to APIs

Sam Maurer
Guest lecture for UC Berkeley CP255 Urban Informatics
October 9, 2017

This demo introduces APIs, which are code-based interfaces that allow outside developers to interact with a piece of software. We'll focus primarily on data-access APIs that operate over the web. In class we'll use Python to connect to a variety of APIs, from earthquake feeds and geocoders to public social media posts.

Before class

1. Save the demo files to your computer

2. From the command line, install this Python package for connecting to Twitter APIs:
   pip install TwitterAPI

   There are a few different package managers for Python. We're using "pip install" instead of "conda install" because Conda doesn't include this package in its index.