Programmer to API Developer

In this course, you'll learn about a number of API design patterns, including behavioral, creational, structural, and adapter, as well as design anti-patterns, and software refactoring techniques. You'll start by examining the overall importance of design patterns, behavioral design patterns and their implementations, and see how to create the iterator design pattern. You'll then explore creational and structural design patterns and the implementation of each, as well as how to create the singleton and adapter design patterns. Next, you'll learn about design anti-patterns and the different types, and software refactoring and refactoring techniques for solving architectural coding problems. Lastly, you'll examine the API pattern principles and the basic design patterns for implementing API resource layout and naming.

Design patterns help programmers resolve common issues by formalizing best practices. In this course, you'll explore API-specific patterns and how they relate to API services. You'll start by learning about the differences between stateful and stateless API patterns, as well as content negotiation, URI templates, Design for Intent, and how each relates to API services. You'll then move on to examine the methods for performing versioning, bulk operations, and pagination with API services. Next, you'll learn about methods for performing sorting and filtering, as well as API notification and error logging with API services. Lastly, you'll see the differences between REST and SOAP API web services and when to use each, as well as how to implement both a RESTful and SOAP-based web service.

Reusable API code can translate into quicker development and release times. In this course, you'll learn about the different types of reusable code patterns and best practices when using each. You'll examine the creation of reusable code using a multi-tier software architecture process, a component-based development process, and an API First development process. You'll then learn the differences between API documentation, specifications, and definitions. Next, you'll move on to look at how to implement both a multi-tier software application and a component-based library. You'll explore the differences between APIs and web services. Finally, you'll learn about reusable REST API web services and how to implement them.

Code refactoring can make code more manageable and efficient, and reduce technical debt. In this course, you'll learn about the need for refactoring, best practices, and benefits of refactoring code. You'll then examine technical debt and how to manage it, how to determine whether or not to refactor, and how refactoring relates to test-driven development. Next, you'll explore available tools to aid in the refactoring process, and the classes of various code refactoring methods and features. You'll continue with an examination of the code refactoring methods of coordinating data, and simplifying Boolean expressions, method calls, and class hierarchies. Lastly, you'll explore the process of refactoring code to move towards a microservice architecture.

Test-driven strategies help you develop highly usable software. In this course, you'll explore a number of test-driven development strategies, including test-driven development, test first development, acceptance test-driven development, traditional software testing, and unit testing. You'll start by examining the TDD cycle, TDD best practices, and the TFD process. You'll then examine the similarities and differences between TDD and TFD, as well as TDD and test last development. Next, you'll learn about the ATDD process and how TDD compares with ATDD. You'll look at unit testing, including its purpose, best practices, characteristics, and testing tools. Lastly, you'll see how to perform unit testing with frameworks.

Coupling test-driven development and design patterns will create higher efficiency for the Agile environment. In this course, you'll examine TDD design patterns and how to develop code using TTD. You'll learn about mock frameworks and mock objects, their importance, and how to use a mock framework while performing TDD. Next, you'll explore user stories and best practices for using them in Agile software development. You'll learn the purpose of user story mapping and how to perform user story mapping with an online tool. You'll see how to write scenarios and scenario outlines using Cucumber and Gherkin scenario syntax. Lastly, you'll learn how to write scenarios and scenario outlines using Cucumber.

SOLID design principles help make software stable and flexible. In this course, you'll learn about the five SOLID design principles for software development, which are Single Responsibility Principle, Open/Closed Principle, Liskov Substitution Principle, Interface Segregation Principle, and Dependency Inversion Principle. You'll then explore the use of each of the five SOLID principles in code. Next, you'll examine the behavior-driven development process, including its benefits, how to perform BDD using Cucumber, and how to integrate BDD into the Scrum process. Lastly, you'll learn about the similarities and differences between test-driven development and behavior-driven development.

Microservices thrive on independent services to provide flexibility, autonomous processes, and communication through APIs. In this course, you'll examine the differences between Microservices and APIs, the benefits of using the Microservice Architecture, and the use of TDD for creating microservices. You'll then learn how to create a simple microservice and the process of using TDD and BDD principles to develop APIs. Next, you'll explore software testing techniques and tools for performing software testing. Lastly, you'll learn how to perform a number of testing techniques, including unit testing, integration testing, regression testing, and acceptance testing.

Without APIs, most software would cease to exist. In this course, you'll learn about the importance of APIs and the move towards cloud-based web services. You'll explore use cases, how they are used for modeling behavior, and how to create a use case diagram. You'll then examine the differences between common API use cases and public APIs and web services that can be consumed. Next, you'll learn how to use a weather service web API and examine common API issues when developing and using APIs. You'll then explore API lifecycle management, and cloud-based APIs and their importance to developers. Lastly, you'll learn API development skills, characteristics that make a good API, and modern trends in API design.

With all of the options available today, navigating API frameworks can be a challenging task. In this course, you'll learn about API security best practices for developing REST and SOAP-based APIs, as well as how to secure each type of API. You'll also examine the ASP.NET Web API framework, and JAVA, PHP, Node.js, and Python API frameworks. Lastly, you'll learn how to work with both the JAVA REST and PHP REST API frameworks.

Final Exam: Programmer will test your knowledge and application of the topics presented throughout the Programmer track of the Skillsoft Aspire Programmer to API Developer Journey.

Human-centered design solves design problems and provides an optimum user experience. In this course, you'll examine the key concepts, principles, benefits, and drawbacks of human-centered design with the use of examples. You'll also learn about qualitative data coding, formulating hypotheses, creating prototypes, and generating design specifications. Finally, you'll explore the differences between storyboarding and prototyping, best practices for prototyping, and prototype evaluation for making data-informed decisions.

In this course, you'll explore the software requirements engineering process and how it applies to API software development, including gathering and validating requirements, and prioritizing features. You'll start by examining the key elements of the requirements engineering process, and how to work with stakeholders, including stakeholder identification, methods for turning stakeholder demands into requirements, and coaching stakeholders with regards to their requirement selection. You'll then learn techniques for identifying requirements, best practices for turning requirements into software specifications, and techniques for prioritizing features. Next, you'll discover tips for identifying hidden requirements and creating a requirements traceability matrix. Lastly, you'll explore planning requirements for API development, how to apply requirements engineering to software development lifecycles, and how to validate software requirements.

Rapid Application Development can rapidly deliver software solutions that keep your customers engaged and provide the benefits that they are looking for. In this course, you'll learn about the RAD methodology, including its advantages and disadvantages, and the traditional Waterfall System Development Life Cycle methodology. You'll then examine comparisons of RAD with the traditional Waterfall SDLC methodology and with the Agile framework. Next, you'll learn about the considerations and characteristics of RAD and the best practices when performing rapid software delivery. You'll explore the customer-oriented RAD framework, including best practices, and available RAD tools and frameworks. Lastly, you'll learn about cross-platform RAD tools and frameworks and how to create an application using the Xamarin development tool.

Agile principles will be reviewed and how they can be applied to Rapid Application Development and also how to manage Agile quality to prevent issues. The effectiveness of rapid software prototyping will be discussed along with methods and processes for delivering software at a higher velocity.

In this course, you'll explore automated testing and design patterns, as well as API testing tools, and the roles and responsibilities of software designers during the automated testing process. You'll start by examining the importance and benefits of automated testing, and the roles and responsibilities of software developers when performing automated testing. You'll then explore how to effectively use unit tests in automated testing, how automated testing can be used to perform functional testing, and how API testing compares with traditional software testing features. Next, you'll examine the use of design patterns in automated testing, common automated testing design patterns, and tools and frameworks that can be used in API testing. You'll then see how to navigate with Selenium WebDriver and how to construct a Selenium page object for a test case. Lastly, you'll see how to use a Selenium page object to create a unit test and implement automated web testing using Selenium unit tests.

Penetration testing can identify both known and unknown vulnerabilities and help avoid security breaches. In this course, you'll learn the importance of penetration testing, what system hardening is, and the requirements of penetration testing. You'll then examine the differences between penetration testing and vulnerability assessments, as well as the various types, stages, and methods of penetration testing. Next, you'll learn about white box, black box, and gray box penetration testing, and the differences in penetration testing methodologies. You'll see the available tools for performing penetration testing, as well as the types of outputs resulting from penetration testing. Lastly, you'll learn about penetration testing best practices and how to perform a penetration test.

Penetration testing in the Software Development Life Cycle helps create a safe and secure end product and minimizes financial and legal risk. In this course, you'll learn where penetration testing fits in the SDLC, the differences between pen testing and developer, and the importance of developer contributions to pen testing. You'll then examine the pen testing team structure and the tasks of the pen testing blue, red, and purple teams. Next, you'll explore the importance of pen testing web services and APIs, what is involved in API pen testing, and the available tools for pen testing APIs. Lastly, you'll learn how to perform a pen test on a REST API, as well as how to perform a pen test using Burp Suite.

As a developer, we are always looking to add value through extensibility and reusability in our code. Creating a modern API is a means of achieving that goal. In this course, you'll learn about developing APIs, potential security risks, how to deal with these risks, and how to design reusable API code. Next, you'll examine the different methods and programming languages used for consuming REST API web services. Finally, you'll explore SOAP APIs, along with constraints and best practices to consider when creating them.

A sustainable API comes from creating a solid foundational design. To achieve this goal, a developer must use best practices along with the right tools. In this course, you'll learn strategies for designing reusable API web services as well as methods for determining the API's maturity level. Next, you'll explore the tools available with Swagger, including the API editor, the API code and client generator, the REST API documentation tool, and the REST API testing tool. Finally, you'll learn about methods and tools for designing REST APIs such as Swagger, OpenAPI, and YAML.

Given the ubiquity of the web and the HTTP protocol, developers can leverage this to create a modern API through RESTful design. In this course, you'll learn the best practices for developing REST APIs and creating documentation. Next, you'll examine working with REST API resources, CRUD implementations, error handling, HTTP status codes, change management, versioning, pagination, and partial responses. Finally, you'll look at best security design practices such as using JSON Web Tokens and API keys.

Final Exam: Programming Analyst will test your knowledge and application of the topics presented throughout the Programming Analyst track of the Skillsoft Aspire Programmer to API Developer Journey.

As the demand for new APIs increases, API Lifecycle Management helps manage API development from start to finish. In this course, you'll learn about the phases and benefits of the API Lifecycle Management process, as well as the Producer and Consumer design pattern. You'll then explore API strategy and planning, API implementation and operation, and API governance and governance models. Next, you'll move on to examine API Lifecycle Management best practices, including monitoring, analytics, security, and versioning techniques. Finally, you'll see how to design a Swagger REST API, implement a Swagger REST API server, test a Swagger REST API, and implement a Swagger REST API client.

In the era of rapid consumption of software products, continuous integration and continuous deployment help produce a continuous flow of software releases. In this course, you'll learn about CI/CD and how to choose the correct strategy, as well as the benefits and principles of CI/CD when deploying APIs. You'll then explore testing APIs during continuous integration and best practices when performing API testing. Next, you'll examine CI/CD pipelines and API deployment, and how to scale the CI/CD pipeline. You'll learn about best practices when using CI/CD, as well as common CI/CD tools, including Jenkins, Travis, GitLab, and TeamCity. Lastly, you'll learn how to use the Jenkins CI server, Travis CI, and GitLab CI.

Using the correct APIs is vital to creating usable and successful software solutions that meet the customer's needs, so it is important to understand how to plan and create an API strategy properly. In this course, you'll begin by exploring the importance of planning, best practices when developing API strategies, and how to manage the API life cycle. Next, you'll examine the advantages, challenges, risks, and key elements to consider when developing an API strategy. You'll then explore the government API design standards and API governance standards for security. You'll continue by examining building verses buying API libraries, and whether to use public, private, or partner APIs. Lastly, you'll explore real-world examples of creating and using API strategies.

Messy code quickly becomes the technical debt that hurts the bottom line of a business and the morale of developers. In this course, you'll learn how to avoid messy code and write clean maintainable API code. You'll also learn the best practices for refactoring, rewriting, commenting code, and avoiding bad habits.

While it's essential to design, develop, and deploy an API that adheres to your design strategy, it is also vital to ensure that the API will be secure from malicious attacks. In this course, you'll explore how to write secure API code. You'll examine API secure development features and best practices, and the various tools you can use when developing APIs. Next, you'll identify Web API and REST API security principles and outline the best practices for ensuring API security. Finally, you'll recognize various methods for performing API authorization and define the different Web API security standards such as OAuth, SAML, and Transport Layer Security (TLS).

The increasing reliance on APIs requires API management strategies and monitoring. Otherwise it can expose the company, its clients, and their information. In this course, you'll learn about the characteristics and best practices of both API management and API monitoring strategies. You'll explore the features and benefits of API management tools and how to use the Kong Enterprise tool for API management. Next, you'll learn about the pros and cons of API monitoring tools and how to use the Assertible API monitoring tool. You'll also learn about the best API metrics to monitor, the benefits of API testing, and how to use SoapUI to perform automated API testing. Lastly, you'll examine the roles of containers and API microservices and the benefits they provide to your API monitoring strategy.

The increasing reliance on APIs and API management requires the ability to collect, augment, store, and visualize system metrics and logs in real-time from host systems and relevant services. In this course, you'll learn how the components of the ELK stack work together and how to perform API analysis using the ELK stack. You'll then explore the purpose and benefits of Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash. Next, you'll learn how to install and configure Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash. Lastly, you'll examine the use of Elasticsearch Notifications for notifying team members when API services have issues, and how to install and configure Elasticsearch Notifications.

In the era of abstract service communication via API, implementing error handling using best practices is essential. In this course, you'll learn some of the best methods for handling and identifying REST API error response messages. You'll also explore the sub-elements of SOAP fault blocks. Next, you'll learn about standards for HTTP response codes, REST API JSON response standards, and standard API error messages. You'll explore how Facebook uses the Graph API web service and methods for dealing with debugging and error handling. Lastly, you'll learn how to use .NET Core to create a REST API web service, and handle error handling and custom errors.

Final Exam: Web Services & Systems Programmer will test your knowledge and application of the topics presented throughout the Web Services and Systems Programmer track of the Skillsoft Aspire Programmer to API Developer Journey.

How users interact with your API is crucial to its success; APIs that use consistent path and routing strategies are easier to use and more compatible with today's systems. The right version control strategy will allow your APIs to grow feature-rich while not adversely affecting your clients. In this course, you'll distinguish the benefits of REST and SOAP APIs. You'll demonstrate how to both develop and consume them. Next, you'll discuss the relationship between URIs and URLs. Then, you'll examine API routing and learn how to use it for API versioning control. Finally, you'll learn how to use Schema-first design and the OpenAPI Specification to develop APIs.

Data models are the language of REST APIs, so a consistent approach to data model formatting and validation, as well as choosing the appropriate strategy for inter-API communications using data models, can unlock the potential of your REST APIs. This approach makes them more effective and useable. In this course, you'll distinguish the differences between XML and JSON and demonstrate how to serialize objects to XML and JSON format. Next, you'll learn how to create a JSON model and validate it for Web API. Finally, you'll classify the differences between public and private APIs and illustrate how to connect to and consume REST APIs.

RESTful APIs allow today's massively distributed systems to communicate and run efficiently, which is made possible by using API standards, standard query syntax, consistency around everyday API operations, and conventional means of deployment. In this course, you'll explore API response standards for returning data from API methods calls. Next, you'll learn how to implement standard responses and use XML response serialization, basic Web API operations, and the OData V4 query syntax. Next, you'll learn how to perform web API conditional operations, implement route names using nouns and verbs effectively, and use functions, actions, and custom actions. Finally, you'll learn how to deploy an API and web application projects to a local server and the cloud, respectively.

With so many online offerings for a user to choose from, an efficient and optimized user interface is crucial to an application's success. To make this happen, software developers should know which client-side UI libraries to use and how. In this course, you'll examine several possible methods for consuming web services from client-side devices and compare their strengths and limitations. You'll move on to learn how to use these client-side UI libraries to consume REST and SOAP APIs, namely AngularJS, ReactJS, Vue.js, JavaScript, jQuery, TypeScript, and Node.js.

The power of modern distributed web systems comes from the interaction between REST APIs and the applications that consume them. Such complex interactions are made possible partly by common REST API standards such as verb usage (GET, POST, PUT and DELETE) and standardized API routes. In this course, you'll learn how to create and consume the following REST API methods: GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE. You'll also learn how to implement REST API route constraints.

Today's most successful web sites offer advanced interactivity using a combination of hypertext and hypermedia. HTML5 gives the modern web developer a collection of exciting new tools for building sites that engage the user like never before. In this course, you will learn the difference between Hypertext and Hypermedia. Next, you will learn about the features of HTML5, such as input types, the canvas, SVG graphics, audio, video, web storage, web worker, and geolocation.

Success in today's distributed systems relies on efficient and reliable communication between components, and that is made possible by RESTful APIs that follow standard practices for aspects such as URI naming, versioning, and cache management. In this course, you'll examine best practices for working with URIs and API resources. You'll then perform API versioning using URIs, and use the URIBuilder class, URI templates, and Windows Workflow Foundation to create URI objects, guidelines for developers, and sets of activities. Next, you'll use ASP.Net Core to implement in-memory caching, distributed caching, and caching using response caching middleware. Finally, you'll carry out advanced REST client testing using the Chrome browser.

With distributed systems using potentially hundreds of API endpoints, web APIs must employ advanced authentication and authorization techniques and ensure protection against common web-based security attacks. In this course, you'll explore the function and characteristics of Web API authentication and authorization before learning how to use local logins and external authorization services. Next, you'll learn how to prevent cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks, enable cross-origin requests in Web API 2, and use Web API filters. You'll then implement various authentication methods, namely basic authentication, forms authentication, and integrated windows authentication. Finally, you'll learn how to enforce SSL in a Web API controller.

The Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) model benefits developers by outsourcing all the behind the scenes aspects of a mobile or web application. In this course, you'll learn how to use the features of Google's Firebase development platform to aid in your app development. You'll begin by examining the benefits of using a Cloud-based backend service such as Firebase, after which you'll use the REST API to manage Firebase, and implement Firebase Authentication on a web page. You'll then use Firebase to configure the Cloud Realtime and Cloud Firestore databases, and the Cloud Storage service. Next, you'll use Firebase to configure and use Cloud Functions and Firebase Hosting. Lastly, you'll explore the features of the Firebase Machine Learning Kit, and implement Firebase Performance Monitoring on a web page.

Because of the magnitude of microservice-based API products available online, the management and protection of API access is a critical and vital security concern. Being familiar with how to use a single service for all of the tasks involved will make this ongoing responsibility easier. In this course, you'll learn how to use the Azure API Management service to deploy and host API web services in the cloud. You'll begin by importing and publishing APIs and creating and publishing API products, before creating mock API responses, and transforming and protecting APIs, all using Azure API Management. Next, you'll use this same service to monitor published APIs, debug APIs, create non-breaking revision changes, and publish multiple API versions. Lastly, you'll learn how to use the Azure API Management developer portal.

An API allows applications to access data, business logic, and back-end service functionality, and are often referred to as an application's front door. In this course, you'll learn how to work with the Amazon API Gateway service to develop, publish, and maintain various types of APIs. You'll begin by exploring various work cases to see the benefits for using Amazon API Gateway as a development tool. You'll then work with Amazon API Gateway to develop, publish, and maintain an HTTP API. Next, you'll use the same Amazon API Gateway service to develop, publish, and maintain a REST API. Lastly, you'll again use the Amazon API Gateway service to develop, publish, and maintain a WebSocket API.

APIs are an essential component when developing software applications, and the industry offers many different types of APIs and API development tools. In this course, you‘ll learn how to work with a number of these API development tools to create and manage web servers, databases, and software development platforms, and to use for containerization. You'll begin by downloading and installing the Node.js web server, the Apache Tomcat web server, and the Windows IIS web server. You'll then download and install the MySQL database server and the MongoDB database server. Next, you'll download and install Visual Studio, Visual Code, Eclipse, and IntelliJ IDEA, all for web and API development. Lastly, you'll download and install the Docker Desktop virtualization environment.

Final Exam: API Developer will test your knowledge and application of the topics presented throughout the API Developer track of the Skillsoft Aspire Programmer to API Developer Journey.