Do you use Yelp, Shopify, Coursera, or GitHub? If so, you have consumed a GraphQL API! These are just a few of the companies that adopted GraphQL as their data communication solution.
The first part of this book answers the why, what, and how questions about GraphQL. The word GraphQL can mean different things to different people, but it is fundamentally a “language” that API consumers can use to ask for data. This part will get you comfortable with the fundamentals of that language.
In chapter 1, you’ll learn what exactly GraphQL is, what problems it solves, and what problems it introduces. You’ll explore the design concepts behind it and how it is different from the alternatives, like REST APIs.
Chapter 2 explores GraphQL’s feature-rich interactive playground. This playground takes advantage of GraphQL’s introspective power, which you can use to explore what you can do with GraphQL and to write and test GraphQL requests. You’ll use this playground to explore examples of GraphQL queries and mutations. You’ll learn about the fundamental parts of a GraphQL request, and you’ll test practical examples from the GitHub GraphQL API.