Generate Comprehensive API Tutorials

This skill provides expertise in creating comprehensive, developer-friendly API tutorials and documentation, transforming complex API concepts into clear, practical guides that help developers successfully integrate and use an API. Tutorials combine theoretical understanding with working, immediately implementable examples. The progressive complexity approach starts with authentication and basic requests, gradually builds through realistic use cases, and ends with advanced capabilities and error handling - including a Quick Start section for experienced developers, with both curl and SDK code provided throughout.

Core tutorial sections cover prerequisites (required knowledge, tools, and accounts), authentication setup (step-by-step authorization implementation), basic operations (full CRUD examples), real-world scenarios (practical use cases), error handling (common errors and solutions), best practices (performance, security, optimization), and troubleshooting (FAQ and debugging guidance). Authentication examples cover API key authentication (curl and JavaScript fetch examples) and a full OAuth 2.0 flow (getting the authorization URL, exchanging the code for a token, and making authenticated requests) using Python's requests-oauthlib.

Request/response examples walk through complete CRUD operations - creating a resource via curl with a JSON body and its response, and reading resources with filtering/pagination parameters via Python requests, iterating over the results. Error handling patterns define a comprehensive error response structure (code, message, field-level details, request ID, documentation link) and a reusable API request wrapper that maps HTTP status codes to specific, actionable error messages (400 validation, 401 authentication, 429 rate limit, 500 server error). Rate limiting and pagination guidance includes a rate-limiting decorator pattern that throttles calls to a configured maximum per second, plus pagination parameter conventions for large result sets.

Use this skill when writing a tutorial that walks a developer from zero to a working integration - authentication, CRUD operations, realistic scenarios, error handling, and rate limiting - progressively rather than as a flat reference. It is well suited to onboarding-focused developer documentation for APIs with OAuth or API-key authentication. It is not meant for a flat reference listing every endpoint with no narrative flow - use the reference-guide approach for that instead.

Input: the API's authentication method, core resources, and realistic use cases to walk through.

Output: a progressive tutorial covering prerequisites, authentication setup, CRUD walkthroughs, error handling, rate limiting, and troubleshooting. Example error-handling wrapper:

async function makeAPIRequest(endpoint, options = {}) {
  const response = await fetch(`https://api.example.com/v1${endpoint}`, options);
  if (!response.ok) {
    const errorData = await response.json();
    switch (response.status) {
      case 401: throw new Error('Authentication failed. Check your API key.');
      case 429: throw new Error('Rate limit exceeded. Please wait before retrying.');
    }
  }
  return await response.json();
}

Covers API key and OAuth 2.0 authentication flows with examples in curl, JavaScript, and Python (requests-oauthlib).

Developer relations teams writing onboarding tutorials for API consumers, and teams that need a progressive, scenario-driven guide rather than a flat endpoint reference.