Some open RESTful APIs to get you started with excitement. I think there should be enough excitement when we start learning something new to keep up the spirit.

So if you're looking to learn what RESTful APIs are then first play with few open available RESTful APIs. Trust me it is really exciting to see how smooth it works.

I am using Visual Studio Code extension 'REST Client' to make these requests and see headers but there are many good alternative and you should check them too. If you like to do everything in terminal than curl is obvious choice. Postman is also good for interactive client application.

NASA APIs

NASA has https://api.nasa.gov/ API portal. Let's hear from them,

Welcome to the NASA API portal. The objective of this site is to make NASA data, including imagery, eminently accessible to application developers. The api.nasa.gov catalog is growing.

You will have to get the API key if you're developing any application but let's just use their endpoints which do not require and you can learn more on NASA's API portal but here I am just diving straight to working.

GET https://images-api.nasa.gov/search?description="Kalpana"&media_type=image

Read documentation for this endpoint here

Kalpana Chawla is my favorite Indian astronaut so I am requesting all data which has in description 'Kalpana' and media_type=image returns only those results which have images along with it. Exciting right.

GitHub APIs

Now let's do something more interesting. We all have github account and so you must be knowing that github also have jobs portal. Good news is they have few APIs public and you can interact with them.

GET https://jobs.github.com/positions.json?description=python&full_time=true&location=colorado

Read more in their documentation here

Here I am requesting all full time jobs in Colorado which has python in their description.