I recently have been learning a number of different APIs. After reflecting on my process for learning I have ended up with the following strategy for working with APIs.

1. Find someone who has used the API in the past and get a brief introduction.
2. Read documentation about the product (starting at the central documentation site for the product, include any tutorials and getting started guides). The goal from this first step is to get a general background understanding of what the product is about, the core concepts and jargon and principles of the product.
3. Use the product without the APIs. If there is a gui to access to product that is available, ensure that you know this, and the jargon around the product. Try and ensure that the information you have from step 1 is grounded in reality.
4. Read more documentation around the APIs. Make the top goal for this round to get enough of an understanding of what you can do.
5. Explore the APIs to see what they expose of the feature. The set of features exposed by APIs often do not match up with what is exposed through the GUI. The most important spot to aim for is the subset of features that are supported by both the API and the GUI.
6. Google (as usual it’s your friend). Sometimes there are some useful results in google that are missed elsewhere. Start with searching for the product name, try adding in API/howto/tutorial/getting started keywords to filter down content if you get too many results.
7. Write some exploratory code to see how the APIs work, and what they do. This should enable you to know enough to actually write the code that you need.

All steps are required, as there are often features which are not easily discovered by just taking one of the above paths. One of the most important steps is ensure that you do understand the subset of what is supported by the API and the front-end. This helps to ensure that you are actually hitting the right part of the API.

From time to time there are options which are not well documented at all, and are only alluded to in technical documents. It can be worth contacting authors of documents if the feature is not clear. The coding and exploration of the system will need to continue after this. It should be expected to continue learning the APIs. At every stage there is value in talking to whatever experts/more experienced people you have available. Being able to quickly pickup a technology and move from no knowledge to confidence in using the API is a valuable tool for developers. Learning new technologies has been an important part of my job as a software engineer, and I expect that it will continue to be for many years to come.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 2:38 am and is filed under Development, Java. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.