Peter Gruenbaum has released part 2 of his Udemy course on API technical writing
Part 2 is now available
Peter Gruenbaum has released part 2 of his Udemy course on API technical writing. Whereas part 1 focused mostly on requests and responses from REST APIs, part 2 gets into a lot more detail with REST APIs and provides more depth. (Part 2 felt more substantial to me than part 1, but it depends your familiarity with JSON and XML.)
In part 2, Peter dives into headers, authorization, methods, query parameters, and other aspects of REST API documentation. He explores various APIs (including the NPR API), walks you through Swagger’s PetStore API, and gives you a reference template for covering each aspect of REST API doc. The course consists of videos, quizzes, and hands-on exercises. It takes about 2 hours to complete the course.
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Course discount
If you want to take the course at a discount, use the code idrather or click this link.
Keeping things simple
Peter’s approach is to keep things simple. He doesn’t assume that you have a programming background, and he avoids getting mired into tool details. By having you go through exercises that use tables in a word-processing application, he keeps the focus on the content instead of the tool. That’s probably a good approach to avoid distraction into the tool side of API doc publishing.
In this course, Peter does actually dive into oAuth authorization, and the technical detail gets more advanced. But he does a good job at communicating the basic concepts you need to know.
Overall, I highly recommend taking Peter’s course. The instruction about REST APIs geared towards technical writers is unparalleled. Check it out: Learn API Technical Writing 2: REST for Writers
For a review of review of Part 1 of Peter’s course, see my previous post, API technical writing course on Udemy from Peter Gruenbaum, and some thoughts on documenting JSON.
About Tom Johnson
I'm a technical writer / API doc specialist based in the Seattle area. In this blog, I write about topics related to technical writing and communication — such as software documentation, API documentation, visual communication, information architecture, writing techniques, plain language, tech comm careers, and more. Check out my API documentation if you're looking for more info about that. If you're a technical writer and want to keep on top of the latest trends in the field, be sure to subscribe to email updates. You can also learn more about me or contact me. Finally, note that the opinions I express on my blog are my own points of view, not that of my employer.