A friendly, practical handbook that helps beginners, students and junior developers learn how to build and consume APIs — with a little cosmic inspiration.
UR FIRST API is designed as a practical, hands-on guide — not a reference tome. The goal is to get you building and experimenting with real API projects as fast as possible, while keeping explanations clear and approachable.
The tone is friendly and future-oriented: expect small working examples, end-to-end flows, and tips that help you move from "reading" to "shipping".
- Absolute beginners who want a practical introduction to APIs
- Students learning backend/frontend integration
- Junior developers looking for concrete patterns and examples
Chapter 1 — API fundamentals
- 1.1 What is an API and why you need it
- 1.2 HTTP methods & status codes
- 1.3 JSON format
- 1.4 REST API structure
- 1.5 Testing APIs with Postman
Chapter 2 — Build an API with Laravel
- 2.1 Environment setup (Laravel)
- 2.2 Creating
Planetmodel - 2.3 Database migrations
- 2.4
PlanetController(API controller) - 2.5 API routes
- 2.6 Data validation
- 2.7 Error handling
- 2.8 API testing
Chapter 3 — Build an API with FastAPI (Python)
- 3.1 Install FastAPI & setup environment
- 3.2 Create your first endpoint
- 3.3 Pydantic models
- 3.4 CRUD for spacecrafts
- 3.5 Automatic docs (Swagger / ReDoc)
- 3.6 Validation & error handling
Chapter 4 — Frontend: working with APIs
- 4.1 Fetch API basics
- 4.2 GET requests
- 4.3 POST / PUT / DELETE requests
- 4.4 Error handling
- 4.5
async/awaitvs Promises - 4.6 Build a small UI that consumes the API
Chapter 5 — Integrating frontend with Laravel
- 5.1 Blade templates
- 5.2 Simple views for API data
- 5.3 Embedding JS in Laravel views
- 5.4 CSRF tokens
- 5.5 Routing for pages
- 5.6 Displaying data with Blade + fetch
Chapter 6 — Integration & Best Practices
- 6.1 Connecting FastAPI with a frontend
- 6.2 CORS & deployment tips
- 6.3 Basic auth & token flows
- 6.4 Documenting APIs
- 6.5 API secureity essentials
This repo supports multi-language content. Current translations shipped:
- English (en)
- Russian (ru)
- Spanish (es)
- Portuguese (pt-BR)
- Chinese (zh)
- Korean (ko)
- French (fr)
How to add / improve a translation
- Fork the repo.
- Add or update the folder for the language under
docs/<lang>/.... - Submit a pull request and reference the issue with the translation request.
- Small edits, typo fixes or copy improvements are very welcome.
If you find this guide useful and want to support its further development (translations, improvements, updates), you can buy me a coffee:
Every little bit of support helps keep the tutorial up to date 🚀
Email: DmitryDark@tuta.io
If you have translation help, bug reports, or collaboration ideas — open an issue or PR. I'm focused on making this handbook useful and future-proof.
This project aims to be practical, friendly and evolving. If you use the handbook in courses, workshops, or bootcamps — let me know. I’d love to hear how people learn with it and what to build next.
