Looking for Online instructional videos on Computer/Network basics/API basics

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go down the AI wormhole to find something,

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best teacher is having an actual use case and having ai assist.

do you have something you want to access the API on in mind? it can be anything...a good use case would be if you have a fitbit or something; they have an api.

sign up for a free hosting site (like cloudflare or something) and engage your AI friend.

tell if 'i want to build a nice dashboard to display all of my health related statistics for the past 12 months and i want to use this free cloudflare worker account i signed up for'.

it will then ask you a few questions, spit out a few lines of SQL for you to run on your cloudflare account (and will tell you step by step how and where to run it) and if you haven't signed up for an account to get to your API (still using fitbit as an example) it will guide you through the steps to getting your login and secret key to access your personal data through google's api.

screenshot the page responses from cloudflare and it will tell you if you've done it right or correct any mistakes.

then it will build the JS to create your own webpage and give you the URL to use.

pull it up, take a screenshot and fuss at AI at everything it got wrong. it will fix everything with a new JS file. BE SPECIFIC.

thats it. you do this a couple of times and you will get very familiar with the flow.*

*or do it with AWS or Azure...same process, just different hosting environments. do it once and you'll feel confident you can post it to any cloud service.

For networking, thats hardware not software. what exactly do you want to know? again, if you have a use case its much easier to learn and you'll be way more invested in finishing it.

i dont see the point of 'learning by hand' any of these processes; you can let AI guide you and make recommendations and be prepared to trash everything and start over.

You'll end up with a much better understanding and you won't have to sweat all the details which quite frankly, are archaic skills at this point. i could write a command line powershell script by hand and fix syntax errors for 3 straight hours; or i can ask AI to do it and 30 seconds later i have a working prompt that is better than i would have come up with on my own.

Just find online basics classes. I think Google has some. Maybe not. You didn’t explain what you want to do.

For networking, if you can get to where you understand the OSI or tcp/ip model and the basics of the common protocols then you are better off than most.

API is an extremely broad and generic term. Perhaps you mean HTTP API? Devs may refer to available functions within in application as API. An autistic dev may call a simple function just a few lines up in the code an API. Generally you use the term when commands cross some arbitrary boundary like a script or microservice.

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think I could find some stuff on network basics, but looking to expand from computer networking to basic API fundamentals

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This is a bit unclear. Do you have a networking background, or are you trying to start there? And what do you mean by API fundamentals?

You need to authenticate, you need a source and a destination for whatever the API is doing.

Don't feel bad about not learning when you were younger, I sat through a 4000 level class at LSU that spent a month explaining the difference between a LAN, a MAN, and a WAN to me.

Can you explain the use case a bit? What are you trying to accomplish, and with which audiences? The top tier folks here can blow you away with suggestions, but if they understand what is going on better, they may be able to give you targeted suggestions.

Appreciate all the responses.

To answer everyone asking for a more detailed understanding of what I’m trying to do… I’ve been in Accounting in the private sector for several years. I’ve always been great with excel.
I’ve recently moved up to a role where I have to give more input revolving around what our company does. I’m still in the accounting/finance sector technically, but with a more hands on approach to further building the company. Think of me being the money guy working closer with the operations side.

A sector of our company developed our own CRM software years ago that is evolving to integrate with different healthcare network systems. I obviously understand the very basic mechanics of integration, but as you can probably tell by my lack of explaining to the TD audience, I need to get a better grasp on really anything related to this. I will undoubtedly need to expand my scope of understanding the 101 stuff to not get caught off guard in any meetings and to even have a shot at future promotions if I stay with this company. I’m not being asked to learn how to work on this stuff, but was given a friendly nudge by the ole boss after sounding a little dumb about some of this stuff. And by no means was I verbally asked to learn this, but I have decent foresight to understand that it’s lazy of me not to expand my understanding in this region.


Thanks everyone

Depending on how your company’s culture and structure is, making friends with the IT/IS team and asking one of them to help you understand the basics may be your best bet. Their info will be inherently geared toward how your company deploys integration tools so what you learn will be more useful to your meetings and decision making.

Checkout the OSI model

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I'll boil this down to save OP time:
Is the link light working? Yes? Check DNS. Next.

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Did you turn it off and turn it back on?