Using a REST API in Python

A great deal of intelligence data is available through REST APIs. Much of the data is available in simple JSON, CSV, or XML documents. In order to make sense of this data, we need to be able to parse these various kinds of serialization formats. We'll focus on JSON because it's widely used. Sadly, it's not universal.

A REST protocol is essentially HTTP. It will leverage POST, GET, PUT, and DELETE requests to implement the essential four stages in the life of persistent data: Create, Retrieve, Update, and Delete (CRUD) rules.

We'll look at currency conversion as a simple web API. This can both help us bribe our information sources as well as provide important information on the overall state of a nation's economy. We can measure national economies against each other as well as measure them against non-national crypto currencies such as bitcoins.

We'll get exchange and currency information from http://www.coinbase.com. There are a lot...