Book Image

API Testing and Development with Postman

By : Dave Westerveld
1 (1)
Book Image

API Testing and Development with Postman

1 (1)
By: Dave Westerveld

Overview of this book

Postman enables the exploration and testing of web APIs, helping testers and developers figure out how an API works. With Postman, you can create effective test automation for any APIs. If you want to put your knowledge of APIs to work quickly, this practical guide to using Postman will help you get started. The book provides a hands-on approach to learning the implementation and associated methodologies that will have you up and running with Postman in no time. Complete with step-by-step explanations of essential concepts, practical examples, and self-assessment questions, this book begins by taking you through the principles of effective API testing. A combination of theory coupled with real-world examples will help you learn how to use Postman to create well-designed, documented, and tested APIs. You'll then be able to try some hands-on projects that will teach you how to add test automation to an already existing API with Postman, and guide you in using Postman to create a well-designed API from scratch. By the end of this book, you'll be able to use Postman to set up and run API tests for any API that you are working with.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: API Testing Theory and Terminology
6
Section 2: Using Postman When Working with an Existing API
13
Section 3: Using Postman to Develop an API

API security in Postman

Now that you understand what authorization and authentication are, it's time to look at how to use this knowledge in Postman. Postman has a lot of built-in options for dealing with API security, and in this section, I will show you how to use each of them. When I was getting started with API testing, I found that figuring out how to authorize and authenticate myself was one of the hardest parts of API testing. I hope that this section will help you figure out how to handle API security on any APIs you are testing. In the previous section, I talked about the distinction between authorization and authentication. However, as I mentioned, sometimes those two terms are conflated. Postman uses the terminology of "authorization" to combine both of these concepts, so as I show you how to do this, I will generally stick to using that term as an umbrella term for both authentication and authorization.

In this section, you will learn how to use the various...