api-lesson-seattle-ds-012720's Introduction

APIs

Students Will Be Able To:

[] Describe the client-server model and request-response cycle
[] Identify examples of clients and servers, both on their local computers and remotely connected
[] Identify examples of requests and responses
[] Understand the difference between a request that returns HTML and an API request that returns JSON
[] Understand the basic pieces of making HTML and JSON requests
- For simple requests, you only need 2 things: HTTP verb and URL
- HTTP verb: this will almost always be GET, kind of like how a data scientist's SQL query will almost always be SELECT. But there are other verbs, including POST and PATCH, which are like INSERT INTO and UPDATE
- URL: this is the string representing the location of the resource. It can also be called a "path", or an "endpoint"
[] Use a browser to make HTML and JSON requests
- This just means typing the URL into the browser. It will always be a GET request.
- The browser will show HTML or JSON depending on the URL. So, reddit.com shows you HTML, whereas reddit.com/.json shows you JSON.
[] Use Postman to make HTML and JSON requests
- Postman has input fields where you can type the URL and select the HTTP verb from a drop-down
- Remember that this is a good tool for exploration/figuring out how to use an API (better than Chrome), but it's not the final product
[] Practice reading someone else's Python code that uses the requests library
[] Use Python requests library to make JSON requests
[] Practice reading the documentation for an API

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