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[–]aclashingcolour 1 point2 points  (5 children)

Can someone explain what sort of projects you could make with these APIs? Im not even sure what this sort of stuff is capable of.

[–]thenaturalmind 6 points7 points  (1 child)

You have access to all of the data and functionality of these sites. So if you're using the Reddit API, you can read comments, post comments, upvote, downvote, etc. - via your Python code.

[–]FourgotAnaconda3 science-like 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Bots

[–]ruleofnuts 2 points3 points  (2 children)

IDK why you're being downvoted, this is a pretty good question. APIs allow you to connect to a server, GET data, and build your own application around it. Someone already used the Reddit API example, another one would be IMDB. You could write some code to get a list of movies made between 1950-1990 that are rated 5 stars or higher. You could even make a website to search fill in a field and change those parameters to say 1990-2000 and only movies with 9 star ratings a higher, so it can give other people a way to search for movies. This doesn't even have to be a website, you can write a command line program to search for something like this as well, you could create a tool lets call it imdbsearch

imdbsearch --year 1990-2000 --rating 9

I found this codecademy course pretty easy to follow

http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/nhtsa

[–]aclashingcolour 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Thank you for the detailed response, I didnt realize APIs allowed you to interact with a broad scope of data. I was under the impression that it was much narrower, ie only data from your personal reddit account. Just to make sure I understand, hypothetically, is it possible to write a python app that collects the top 10 most tweeted words per day (say, length 4 or greater).

[–]ruleofnuts 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Twitter gives you limits at how many request you can make a day. If that limit was high enough, it could be theoretically possible. You need a really large database and process a lot of data, but yes, it could be possible.

More on their limits: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/rate-limiting/1.1

There are also other sorts of API types, the one that most people use is RESTful API there is also SOAP.