Agreed, I was thrown off a bit too. I believe by public they mean published and advertised for public use. Often I believe API's aren't intended to be used by any users, so usage and whatnot isn't documented. The API's here appear to be available to anyone who can make an account.
Public doesn't typically mean unauthenticated, but rather explicitly published for use by users and applications outside of the organization that created the API. Hopefully, this comes with some guarantee of documentation, stability, and backwards compatibility. A private API, in contrast, is intended only for use by other applications and services in the same organization as the API creator and makes no such guarantees that you will ever be warned when it is going to change, so if you figure out it exists, use it at your own risk.
This is just the same distinction as private versus public function signatures in a library or a system service extended to remote services. The runtime may or may not use technical means to prevent you from using the private API, but whether or not you can do it, if you choose to, beware that it is to be considered an implementation detail and subject to change at any time without prior notice.
Note that the list might be outdated - they mentioned GoodRead's API which is deprecated (they no longer accept new developers to signup). I know this because I was recently researching on creating a book recommendation hobby project.
Goodread API are not maintained or as tou mentioned depreciated.
Like you I was also working on side project to fetch bookquotes along with source author/book.
Finally, I had to use web scrapping to make application work.
Does anyone know a good api for electronic part datasheet search? For example to query a part name 'BC547' or 'CD4060' and get short description or datasheet? It would be nice to have original datasheet not bloated with some site ads as alldatasheets.com serves. This breakes automatic indexers in my datasheet directory.
octopart just came out with an api. the site usually links to distributor, but top of part name will often have datasheet.. so hopefully that's in api! i havent used it yet
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 34.7 ms ] threadFor example, YNAB's API is listed here, which allows a tool using the API to interact with one user's personal account at YNAB.
I'm not sure what part of that I would consider public apart from the documentation. Isn't that just "an API"?
This is just the same distinction as private versus public function signatures in a library or a system service extended to remote services. The runtime may or may not use technical means to prevent you from using the private API, but whether or not you can do it, if you choose to, beware that it is to be considered an implementation detail and subject to change at any time without prior notice.
More:
https://www.programmableweb.com/apis/directory
https://apis.guru
https://github.com/Kikobeats/awesome-api
https://web.archive.org/web/2015/https://www.publicapis.com