About the Course

Get an overview of the course, its prerequisites, and the intended audience.

What is an API?

An API is a software gateway that allows different software components to communicate with each other. APIs help expose the capabilities of an application to the outer world, allowing for programmatic access to their data.

Consider the case of a service like The Movie Database that provides the details of movies, TV shows, and people. Building and exposing an API for this service will allow others to programmatically fetch the data this service offers, such as fetching credit details of a movie. We can provide examples of other popular services that provide APIs for extended uses-cases. Widely used services, such as YouTube, Reddit, Google Maps, and others provide APIs which allow authorized clients to access the resources provided by these systems.

What is a movie API?

A movie API provides information from an online information repository related to movies, TV shows, and people (cast and crew). The repository also keeps data related to each of these items, such as the cast, crew, plot summaries, user reviews, ratings, release dates, and more. Most of the movie APIs collect data primarily from the users themselves and content generated by the users.

A movie API platform makes it easy for its users to get all this data through an extensive set of endpointsAn endpoint is one end of a communication channel. For APIs, an endpoint includes a URL of a server or service.. The endpoints can be used to query for any information regarding movies. A number of similar movie APIs exist but in this course, we’ll explore and use The Movie Database API.

Use cases of TMDB APIs

Any application that relies on or uses information related to movies and TV shows can benefit from the services provided by the movie APIs.

The available movie APIs have so much helpful information. These APIs make it much easier for developers to use all the relevant data in their applications. Imagine collecting the whole data from scratch; it’s a big task that would require massive time and effort. A developer intending to create an application for movies can use the movie API that is most independently efficient. This decreases their own efforts. Other than using the movie APIs in development, we can even perform data analytics or build exciting and fun quizzes for movies and TV shows to get more information from the users.

Prerequisites

This course requires a basic understanding of APIs and fundamental knowledge of JavaScript and React.

This course is intended for every individual who wants to learn how to use and integrate TMDB API. You can be either of the following, but not limited to:

  • A beginner who is new to the world of APIs and wants to learn their basic usage.
  • A professional who has ample experience of working with other movie APIs and wants to explore The Movie Database as well.