13. APIs

Learning goals — By the end of this chapter you will be able to:

• Explain what an API is and how REST APIs communicate over HTTP

• Use the requests library to make GET requests and inspect the response

• Parse JSON responses into Python dicts and lists

• Pass query parameters to filter or configure API responses

• Handle HTTP errors and exceptions gracefully

APIs let your code communicate with the world — web services, data sources, and cloud tools all expose REST APIs. This chapter builds the practical skills to query any REST API from Python.

Chapter flow

• 13.1. API Basics
• 13.2. API Reliability