With APIs everywhere, every developer gets confronted with OAuth. So what is the best way to learn OAuth? It depends … and there is the right solution for you …
When you hear OAuth, do you think “complicated”?
If you build a mobile app, a cloud solution or a web application: sooner or later you will need to integrate APIs and those APIs are protected by OAuth. Of course, if you are outsourcing this you don’t need to worry about APIs and OAuth. But if you do it yourself, this is something that you’ll need to get used to.
How does OAuth work?
… is one of the most common questions I hear from mobile developers, backend developers, solution architects, and product managers. And they are right, OAuth can get quite complicated and confusing.
My story on learning OAuth
When I started out on OAuth, there was no training material available, just a big IETF document describing the standard. What a piece of work!
I learned OAuth the hard way… possible, but at which cost! Countless hours of trying to make sense of complicated OAuth documentation. I still remember how I sat at Starbucks, trying to work through an OAuth interaction, using coffee mugs to represent servers and napkins to represent tokens.
That is when I decided to create a much better OAuth training.
Well, what is good training? Everyone learns differently, is at a different stage in the learning cycle and brings different previous knowledge. So let’s see which OAuth training is right for you.
Which of the following statements best describes your current situation? Click on it!
Undecided? Let me tell you how I approach this. When I am learning a new technology, I first want to read a concise description of the fundamentals and concepts. It’s got to be a quick, easy and concise read. I follow up with some kind of action-learning. What I mean with this are practical examples and experiences, that allow me to see the concepts in action and help me apply the concepts.
The OAuth Book – the best way to learn OAuth in a structured way
If you are just starting out with APIs and OAuth, the best way to learn OAuth is to get a solid foundation first, without wasting a lot of time on unnecessary stuff. Since you you don’ t have a lot of time, I think you would appreciate a concise introduction to the topic.
The OAuth Book introduces the basics of OAuth. This book focuses on the big picture, the principles behind OAuth, different use cases and covers all four OAuth grant types.
The OAuth interactions are represented as a series of pictures, because – as we all know – a picture says more than 1000 words. See here for an example.
The book is short, just over 80 pages. We cover all the important OAuth concepts, so there is simply no room for fluff. The book is written in simple terms, so you can read it in one or two sessions.
Get your copy of the OAuth Book now.
The OAuth Course – the best way to learn OAuth interactively
You want to get a good foundation in OAuth and API Security. You rather listen to a teacher than read a book. You want to see the OAuth components in action. You appreciate visualizations, animations, and interactive quizzes. If this is you, then the best way to learn OAuth is a video course on OAuth.
The OAuth Course is easy to follow and offers an introduction to API Security with OAuth 2.0. In more than 3 hours and more than 30 lectures, you will gain an overview of the capabilities of OAuth and work with some practical applications of OAuth.
GET the OAuth course NOW!
OAuth flows and interactions are explained in a graphical way using sequence diagrams — a good picture says more than 1000 words. In this video course we have taken this a step further and even animate the diagrams, so we can show you what happens first and what happens next in the interactions.
The course does not only show you the fundamentals. If you want to deepen your knowledge, you need practical examples, concrete use-cases, and your own experiences. This is why the course offers you hands-on tutorials showing you how to use OAuth on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google and Paypal.
Jump into one of the lectures and see how we work in the course…
OAuth in Practice – the best way to learn OAuth on practical examples
You are on the way to become an OAuth master. On your road to mastery, you may want to look someone over the shoulder, who is already an expert at using the technology. For example, a colleague who works with it for years. That would be the absolute best way to learn OAuth for you.
But what if I don’t have such an expert available? I have thought about ways to provide this action-oriented learning, the experience of sitting next to an experienced colleague and let him explain, how he uses the technology. And I came up with a new concept. Let me know what you think about it:
I will show you how to use OAuth for some of the big APIs out there, such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Google on video. In these videos, you can see me do everything that needs to be done for OAuth interactions, understanding the components on a practical example, see me setting up the clientID and clientSecret, request the authorization code, get the access token and finally call the protected API — all on real-world examples.
Now, I would like to invite you to one of these courses: