Essential Free API and Programming Book Collections Every Developer Should Know
This article introduces two highly popular GitHub repositories—public-apis, a curated list of over 1,500 free public APIs, and free-programming-books, a massive collection of free programming books and courses—detailing their categories, popularity metrics, and why they are indispensable resources for developers.
The article presents two widely used GitHub projects that serve as essential resource hubs for developers.
public-apis: Free API Collection
This repository aggregates more than 1,500 free public APIs covering domains such as weather, maps, and machine learning, enabling developers to locate suitable services quickly.
Animals, Anime, Animation
Anti‑spam, Art Design
Sports, Finance, Data Validation
Development Tools, Collections, etc.
Why it is popular: every API is verified for availability, sample code is provided for multiple programming languages, categories are clearly organized for easy search, and the project is community‑maintained with continuous updates.
free-programming-books: Free Programming Books
This repository, with over 380,000 stars, is regarded as the most comprehensive free collection of programming learning resources on GitHub.
Programming books (by language: Python, JavaScript, Java, C++, …)
Programming books (by topic: algorithms, machine learning, web development, …)
Free online courses
Programming learning websites
Problem sets and coding challenges
Multi‑language support: the project indexes books in more than 80 languages, including Chinese, English, Japanese, French, German, and others, so users can find resources in their preferred language.
Comparison
Stars: public-apis has 428,485 stars, while free-programming-books has 386,794 stars.
Resource type: public-apis provides API endpoints; free-programming-books offers books, courses, and related learning material.
Main use: public-apis is intended for developers to integrate external services quickly; free-programming-books serves as a learning hub for programmers at any level.
Developer Value
public-apis allows developers to find ready‑to‑use APIs without building services from scratch—for example, fetching weather data or using a face‑recognition API directly.
free-programming-books is an ideal starting point for learning programming, whether for beginners or advanced learners.
Both projects are completely free and open‑source, permitting anyone to use or contribute.
public-apis: https://github.com/public-apis/public-apis | Stars: 428,485<br/> free-programming-books: https://github.com/EbookFoundation/free-programming-books | Stars: 386,794
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