Never Call an API Directly from Your Code
At some point in your career you are going to need to do something that is not part of the language's framework. Most language frameworks can do many things right out of the box such as writing and reading files, network communications, etc. However there are many things that fall outside the scope of the framework. For example you may need to produce Microsoft Office documents or PDFs or communicate with an external source for information such as getting Stock Exchange information from Yahoo. The possibilities of what you will need are endless. The point is that you will need to do so eventually. In most cases an API will exist and all you have to do is use that API to implement that functionality. What's an API? Let's backup for a moment What is an API? API stands for Application Programming Interface. The name says it all. It really just means that it is a set of components that allows you to access something programmatically. Let's say for example that you w...