Step-by-step instructions for buying milk

1. Where do they need to go?

"Go to the corner shop.".

That's fairly obvious - they need to know the destination. And so does your computer, except that when we're looking for data through an API the destination is called the 'endpoint'. For most APIs this will look just like a web address.

https://my-corner-shop.com/

2. What do you need them to get for you?

"... and get me some milk.".

Once your computer knows where to look, it needs a description or a name for the thing you want it to fetch. In our analogy we're looking for milk from the shop, so the request might look something like this:

https://my-corner-shop.com/milk

But ... sometimes you need to be more specific. How much milk? Which type? and so on. Your computer doesn't know what you mean, it can only work with what you've asked for. So how do you tell it which options it should look for?

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