Reddit API How-to-Guide

What is Reddit?

Reddit is:

"A social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website. Reddit's registered members can submit content, such as posts or direct links. Registered users can then vote submissions up or down to organize the posts and determine thier position on the site's pages. The submissions with the most positive votes appear on the front page or the top of a category. Content entries are organized by areas of interest called "subreddits" or "subs". The subreddit topics include news, science, gaming, movies, music, books, fitness, image-sharing, among many others."

In other words, Reddit is a website that is driven by user submission. Users can decide, by up or down voting, what other users see first. In addition to main submissions that can be found on the main page, users can further control the information they receive by adding and removing subreddits."Subs" allow users to discuss common interests with other members of the Reddit community.

Note: links found on Reddit and its Subs are both safe and not safe for work (NSFW). Matriculate through Reddit at your own risk!

What's an API?

An API is:

"An application programming interface (API) is a set of subroutine definitions, protocols, and tools for building software and applications. A good API makes it easier to a program by providing all the building blocks, which are then put together by the programmer. An API may be a web-based system, operating system, computer hardware, or software library. An API specification can take many forms, but often includes specifications for routines, data structures, object classes, variables, or remote calls, POSIX, Microsoft Windows API, the C++ Standard Template Library, and Java APIs and examples if different APIs."

Reddit API

The Reddit API found here enables programmers to grab "stuff" from Reddit and post in various locations. The "stuff" can be user account information, flair, links, comments, or live threads.

What is the Purpose of this How to Guide?

The purpose of this how-to-guide is to provide a visual step-by-step guide for anyone that would like to pull information from Reddit, but is unsure where to begin. This guide assumes that the user has a foundational understanding of HTML, JavaScript, and JSON. Click the link below to start at the beginning on the how-to-guide, or jump to any section using the menu to the left.