You finished!

Congratulations, you finished the documenting REST APIs section of the course. You've learned the core of documenting REST APIs. We haven't covered publishing tools or strategies. Instead, this part of the course has focused on the creating content, which should always be the first consideration.

Summary of what you learned

During this part of the course, you learned the core tasks involved in documenting REST APIs. First, as a developer, you did the following:

• How to make calls to an API using cURL and Postman
• How to pass parameters to API calls
• How to inspect the objects in the JSON payload
• How to use dot notation to access the JSON values you want
• How to integrate the information into your site

Then you switched perspectives and approached APIs from a technical writer's point of view. As a technical writer, you documented each of the main components of a REST API:

• Resource description
• Endpoint definition and method
• Parameters
• Request example
• Response example
• Code example
• Status codes

Although the technology landscape is broad, and there are many different technology platforms, languages, and code bases, most REST APIs have these same sections in common.

The next part of the course

Now that you've got the content down, the next step is to focus on publishing strategies for API documentation. This is the focus of the next part of the course.