Interacting With REST APIs and Python (Overview)

Darren Jones
Interacting With REST APIs and Python Darren Jones 01:36
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There’s an amazing amount of data available on the Web. Many web services, like YouTube and GitHub, make their data accessible to third-party applications through an application programming interface (API). One of the most popular ways to build APIs is the REST architecture style. Python provides some great tools not only to get data from REST APIs but also to build your own Python REST APIs.

In this video course, you’ll learn:

  • What REST architecture is
  • How REST APIs provide access to web data
  • How to consume data from REST APIs using the requests library
  • What steps to take to build a REST API
  • What some popular Python tools are for building REST APIs
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Course Slides (.pdf)

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Sample Code (.zip)

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00:00 Interacting With REST APIs and Python. There’s a huge amount of data available on the Web. Many web services such as YouTube and GitHub make their data accessible to third-party applications through an application programming interface known as an API.

00:15 One of the most popular ways to build APIs is the REST architecture style. Python provides some great tools not only to get data from REST APIs, but also to build your own Python REST APIs.

00:27 In this course, you’ll learn what REST architecture is, how REST APIs provide access to web data, how to consume data from REST APIs using the requests library, what steps to take to design a REST API, and how to use some popular Python tools to build a REST API.

00:45 By using Python and REST APIs, you can retrieve, parse, update, and manipulate the data provided by any web service you are interested in.

00:55 Any code that you see running in the REPL will be using the bpython interpreter. This is a replacement Python interpreter that offers a number of enhancements, including code highlighting and suggestions but any code you see running on screen will work in the Python REPL, which is typically accessed by typing python or python3 at your terminal or command-line prompt.

01:14 Don’t forget to download the course materials as they include full versions of all the API applications that you’ll create in the course, as well as supporting files which will make your learning experience easier.

01:25 And when you finish the course, take the interactive quiz, which will help you track your learning progress.

01:32 So now you know what’s going to be covered. Let’s get started.

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