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copied!<p>Searches should include Wikipedia, which is <em>surprisingly good</em> for a number of programming concepts/terms such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_Program_Interface" rel="noreferrer">Application Programming Interface</a>:</p> <p><strong>What is an API?</strong></p> <blockquote> <blockquote> <p>An application programming interface (API) is a particular set of <strong>rules ('code') and specifications that software programs can follow to communicate with each other</strong>. It serves as an interface between different software programs and facilitates their interaction, similar to the way the user interface facilitates interaction between humans and computers.</p> </blockquote> </blockquote> <p><strong>How is it used?</strong></p> <p>The same way any set of rules are used.</p> <p><strong>When and where is it used?</strong></p> <p>Depends upon realm and API, naturally. Consider these:</p> <ol> <li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IA-32" rel="noreferrer">The x86 (IA-32) Instruction Set</a> (very useful ;-)</li> <li>A <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS_interrupt_call" rel="noreferrer">BIOS interrupt call</a></li> <li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL" rel="noreferrer">OpenGL</a> which is often exposed as a C library</li> <li>Core Windows system calls: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_API" rel="noreferrer">WinAPI</a></li> <li>The Classes and Methods in <a href="http://www.ruby-doc.org/core/" rel="noreferrer">Ruby's core library</a></li> <li>The <a href="http://www.w3.org/DOM/" rel="noreferrer">Document Object Model</a> exposed by browsers to JavaScript</li> <li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_service" rel="noreferrer">Web services</a>, such as those provided by <a href="http://developers.facebook.com/docs/" rel="noreferrer">Facebook's Graph API</a></li> <li>An implementation of a protocol such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Native_Interface" rel="noreferrer">JNI in Java</a></li> </ol> <p>Happy coding.</p>

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