In this section, you learned about the request/response cycle and using APIs. APIs are critical to software development, and they can be powerful tools for gathering data for data scientists.
You will be able to:
- Understand and explain what was covered in this section
- Understand and explain why this section will help you become a data scientist
APIs can provide access to a wide range of data that you might need as a data scientist. Key takeaways:
- 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(s) requests to APIs
- The two most common HTTP methods you will use when accessing APIs are GET (to retrieve information) and POST (to send information).
- Typically you'll need to authenticate in some manner with most APIs - one common method for doing so is using OAuth