ds2012-flatiron / dsc-apis-recap

APIs - Recap

Introduction

In this section, you learned about the HTTP request/response cycle and using APIs. APIs are critical to software development, and they can be powerful tools for gathering data for data scientists.

Key Takeaways

APIs can provide access to a wide range of data that you might need as a data scientist.

Key takeaways include:

• While there are many other kinds of APIs, as a data scientist, you'll typically be working with web APIs.
• The requests library in Python is a great starting point for making HTTP requests to APIs.
• Most APIs you encounter will return results in JSON format.
• The two most common HTTP methods you'll use when accessing APIs are GET (to retrieve information) and POST (to send information).
• Typically, you'll need to authenticate in some manner to gain access to most APIs - one common method for doing so is using OAuth.