Book Image

Learn Python Programming, 3rd edition - Third Edition

By : Fabrizio Romano, Heinrich Kruger
5 (1)
Book Image

Learn Python Programming, 3rd edition - Third Edition

5 (1)
By: Fabrizio Romano, Heinrich Kruger

Overview of this book

Learn Python Programming, Third Edition is both a theoretical and practical introduction to Python, an extremely flexible and powerful programming language that can be applied to many disciplines. This book will make learning Python easy and give you a thorough understanding of the language. You'll learn how to write programs, build modern APIs, and work with data by using renowned Python data science libraries. This revised edition covers the latest updates on API management, packaging applications, and testing. There is also broader coverage of context managers and an updated data science chapter. The book empowers you to take ownership of writing your software and become independent in fetching the resources you need. You will have a clear idea of where to go and how to build on what you have learned from the book. Through examples, the book explores a wide range of applications and concludes by building real-world Python projects based on the concepts you have learned.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
16
Other Books You May Enjoy
17
Index

Consuming an API

There are several ways to consume an API. We have seen a very common one: the console. This is a great way to experiment with an API, but it can be a bit cumbersome when the data we need to pass along with the request, including query parameters, headers, and so on, becomes more and more complex. For those situations, there are other options.

One option we often use is to talk to the API from within a Jupyter Notebook. We can use the Requests library (or anything equivalent) to call the endpoints and inspect data from within the Notebook. This solution is quite comfortable.

Another option is to use dedicated tools that provide you with a graphical user interface, like Postman, which comes packed with plenty of functionality. You can find Postman here: https://www.postman.com.

Browsers also now come with extensions that allow you to talk to APIs very easily.

Of course, we could also create a console or a GUI application that we can then use to exercise...