Command-Line Apps and APIs
I will start by acknowledging the fact that most people have no inkling what Command line apps or APIs are so I will try and make this blog as simple and informative as possible.
Command Line applications are simple applications that are executed on the terminal (shell, console…depending on what you refer to it as) using a text interface…basically, you type into the shell to execute your application; makes sense? I recently found out that git is a command-line application and you can imagine my surprise when I did…yet I’ve been using it for a while and the thought never crossed my mind. You can read more on command-line applications here.

And what are APIs?
APIs (Application Programming Interface) are software to software interfaces that allows communication between two software, or products or services. They connect two software programs; the server(which provides the unique API key) and the client . The API will manipulate the data as per requests of the client.
In simple terms, APIs are more or less like waiters, getting requests and posting orders(giving back what was requested).

Codecademy has a resource of interactive tutorials on APIs which you can find here or for a simple python API tutorial, you can use this.
To get started building a command line applications that uses API to consume HTTP verbs you will need:
A virtual environment of-course (to seclude/separate individual development projects)
A command-line parsing library like Docopt or Clint.
And an Api library from where to get your Api key from.
You can get started by building a weather API that gives you the forecast of a given city or you can choose from a host of other tutorials showing you basic APIs you can build.
Happy building and exploring!!
