

Codecademy introduces API lessons with YouTube, SoundCloud, Parse, and more - theunquietone
http://www.codecademy.com/blog/52-introducing-api-lessons

======
zbruhnke
This is cool. Twilio is one of the first API's I fell in love with strictly
because of their docs and how easy it was to learn everything, there are some
other API's that took me longer to get used to working with (Google Maps comes
to mind) but with something like this my progress would have come along so
much faster.

I feel more and more like now is one of the best times to want to learn
anything, programming included. But you guys really are making it so easy for
the next generations of programmers to learn the right way.

Thanks for this. I hope it makes the kind of impact it is capable of.

------
sergiotapia
All of these examples further solidify my hapiness in switching from C# to
Ruby as my primary language. It's so beautiful!

The project I'm working on wants to send SMS messages to clients, but we
postponed that for v2. But after seeing the example for Twilio I'll heavily
recommend we implement this feature now, as it seems very straightforward and
will be a major upsell for our startup.

My brother is studying Comp Sci (well in Bolivia it's called Ingenieria de
Sistemas - less b-tress more ASP.Net), and I really want him to learn Ruby and
become happier with his work.

~~~
jonmarkgo
Hey Sergio, That's so awesome to hear (I worked on the Twilio Codecademy
lessons) - if you have any more questions feel free to drop me an e-mail at
jonmarkgo@twilio.com and I'll be happy to help.

------
FredFredrickson
Codeacademy is a great site... it makes it fun to brush up on the basics or
try out a new language. It helped me learn some Javascript recently, and I
really enjoyed the course.

I'd love to see them do something on OAuth / Twitter. I find that stuff very
confusing.

~~~
d0gsbody
Not an API, but I think they should also add classes on PHP/MySQL.

------
jonathanjaeger
Started Codecademy recently and really like the lessons. In terms of
gamification, the badges do nothing for me, but the points and day streak are
great. I had a 15 day streak and it really gave me the extra incentive to do
just 10 minutes a day even when I was particularly busy. I forgot one day and
now I have to start the clock over again, haha.

Will dig into API stuff once I actually finish the other basics.

------
jnotarstefano
I'm a fairly fanatical Codecademy user, so this is not news to me: I've been
testing these courses since at least two weeks :)

Unfortunately this means I'm having all sorts of data integrity issues: for
example, I can't access the third lesson in the Parse track, which is showing
9/4 exercises done. I'm also having trouble finishing several exercises in
these courses, due to puzzling errors and, possibly, flawed tests.

But, wrinkles aside, I think these lectures are a brilliant way to generate
leads: I subscribed to pretty much every service that has course on its API
(Parse, Twilio, NPR...).

~~~
slaundy
thanks for testing! so glad to hear you like the lessons and are signing up
for the APIs!

Could you try the Parse course again? I fixed an issue a few minutes ago that
may have cleared up your problem.

And please continue sending in tester reports on the other bugs you mentioned.
We & our API partners would love to fix them up.

~~~
jnotarstefano
I can report that the Parse course is now correctly working. Thank you!

I'll check tomorrow if I'm still having issues with Twilio. _I also got my
provision rejected from Sendgrid, but I'm trying to solve this on my own._
EDIT: Solved!

Thank you again for these wonderful courses!

~~~
slaundy
Yay! Glad to hear it all got resolved. Be in touch if you hit any more
problems. And let us know what you build!

------
d0gsbody
_applause_

I also wish they would fix their current classes. A couple of bugs are keeping
me from finishing their Jquery and web(original) tracks. I emailed them about
it, but still doesn't work.

~~~
slaundy
Sorry about that. Could you send me the links and more info? I'll look into
it. sasha at codecademy dot com. thanks.

------
maximem
It seems for beginners in code but really nice initiative!... UI . I've
stumbled upon webshelll.io recently on HN
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4728671>. Quite a good tool for learning
fastly how to use and script apis. Seems to be made for developer bored with
finding , learning and scripting API.

------
physcab
It took me a while to figure out what this was. At first I thought Codecademy
was providing lessons VIA API. I thought, "wow, they've essentially built a
framework for education...pretty cool". Then I went to the actual website and
saw that it just teaches you how to program OTHER APIs. Maybe their title
should more accurately be "Learn How to Program APIs" instead.

~~~
epaga
Seems to me like it was simply an (understandable) misread of a clear title.
It's "API lessons", not "lessons API". :)

------
6thSigma
This got me thinking - anyone know of an API or open source project that
implements a browser-based IDE where you can make your own programming
challenges or tutorials? Perhaps Codeacademy is working on something like
that?

~~~
slaundy
We launched it a year ago :) <http://www.codecademy.com/create/creator>

Based on open source repl.it

~~~
6thSigma
Thanks! I'll definitely try it out.

------
SanjayUttam
This is going to be super helpful for one of the projects I'm working
on...researching APIs is always a bit time consuming due to the huge
discrepancy in documentation quality/location/formatting/examples/etc.

------
nanook
I remember really struggling with cross-domain AJAX requests. I wish they'd
talked about that.

Also, its quite likely that one would be using jQuery (or some other lib.) to
do all of this in practice.

~~~
slaundy
Good points, thanks for the ideas. Keep an eye on this—today is just day 1!

------
aorshan
I'm curious as to why they wouldn't include lessons on the Facebook and
Twitter APIs. I would think that would be a primary example of APIs to be
familiar with.

~~~
caseysoftware
The fastest way to annoy someone is for the docs/examples to be out of date.

Previously Facebook has introduced API breaking changes pretty regularly, so
it would be challenging at best. They've made a commitment for 2013 that
breaks will only happen quarterly so it should be safer for Codecademy to
commit soon.

------
Crake
I really love Codeacademy. Keep up the good work, guys!

------
allbombs
very cool!

