No AJAX lessons Within fCC Tutorials

So this question is mainly aimed at the great people at fCC who design the tutorials that are meant to help us devs discover the wonders of coding:

WHY does the section entitled “JSON API’s and Ajax” NOT COVER AJAX?!?!? It clearly stops after referring to ‘geolocations’, and then dives right into a random quote machine project, which seems to me a significant leap in assumed abilities. API’s out in the real world are a lot more complex than the simple ‘/json/cats.json’ file you have students playing with in the beginning. We (or at least I) need more stepping stones.

When will lessons covering AJAX be introduced? If not, does anybody have suggestions for alternative avenues?

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Previously:

Look for public APIs.
Make calls to the APIs.
Inspect and traverse results to get a feel for them.

Generally, no two APIs are the same - it’s always going to be a process of making test calls and inspecting the results.

It’s very easy to get an account with Microsoft and sign up for for an API key for Bing searches. Then you can play with them to your heart’s content.

It’s also easy to get an account for TMDB - the movie database, which has lots of data you can query and look at.

Also you can look for other open/free APIs and play with those.

Programmable Web - Directory of APIs

You can do all of this right from inside codepen/jsfiddle or right from your browsers javascript console/scratchpad. Make the AJAX call and console log the results and look at it.

Codecademy used to have some good API courses, but now the only one they have left is in Python. The idea would be the same, of course, minus CORS, but probably better to use a JavaScript based course at first.

I made a step-by-step challenge for my coding group that uses the YouTube API. It’s not a full-on tutorial in that it doesn’t give you the actual code to cut and paste, but it does have a LOT of hints. You’re welcome to give it a try if you think it might help.

YouTube API Project

The FCC dev team knows that this is one of the areas that need a lot of improvement, and it’s most definitely a work in progress. In the interest of attempting to make it more helpful, are you able to provide specifics as to what you’d like to see? (Definitely understand if you don’t understand it enough to really say–just thought I’d ask!)

I can’t give you a definitive timeline for when they new curriculum with regards to this will be rolled out, but in the meantime, the thing that helped me personally the most was Team Treehouse’s course on AJAX. You can’t access it without a membership, but they also have a limited free trial in which you can watch whatever you want and cancel at any time without paying anything. I literally signed up for the free trial just for that, at the recommendation of others.

Also, in case you’re curious or want to try to contribute, here’s the ongoing GitHub Issues thread about these challenges and the attempts to make them better.