Who Should Take This Course?

About the course

In today’s world, application programming interfaces (APIs) are primarily used for communication between various systems. These APIs can be based on different architectures, such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Graph Query Language (GraphQL), and REpresentational State Transfer (REST). Among these, REST is the most commonly used architecture for building APIs.

This course focuses on:

• What REST architecture is all about
• How to consume REST APIs
• How to build custom REST APIs

There are two types of lessons in the “Server” section of this course, design lessons and coding lessons. The design lessons explain the core concept and what the output will be. The coding lessons contain the steps to implement the design and the explanation of how the code works.

Each coding lesson has the following sections:

• General introduction: This section provides an overview of the concept that the lesson is going to implement.
• Steps: This section contains the steps to implement the concept.
• How it works: This section explains how the steps implement the concept, leveraging the functionality provided by the library/framework.
• Try it yourself: This is a code widget where the learner can create the code by following the steps.
• Solution: This is a complete solution present at the end of each lesson. Although there is a step-by-step guide to creating the code, this is provided so that the learner can easily identify their mistakes.

Learning outcomes

Python makes consuming and building REST APIs flexible and simple. In this course, we’ll learn the following:

• How to use the Python library to connect to and consume from a REST server
• How to define the requirements of an API
• How to choose a specific framework that can meet the requirements of the API
• How to implement Create, Retrieve, Update, and Delete (CRUD) operations using HTTP methods such as GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE

By the end of this course, you’ll be able to do the following in Python:

• Connecting to a server with and without Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)
• Consuming the result from the API of the server
• Creating the API for CRUD operations
• Providing a way to announce the capabilities of the API

Intended audience

Are you proficient in Python and want to expand your skill set with backend development?

In today’s market, backend development is primarily done using REST. Python provides low-key entry into the REST-based development space.

So, if you’re ready to expand your development horizons, then let us guide you step-by-step toward gaining proficiency in REST-based backend development using Python.

Prerequisites

The course doesn’t assume prior experience or knowledge of REST or related terminologies. We’ll introduce each concept step-by-step throughout the course.

This course won’t require sophisticated Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) or tools to work with and develop REST APIs in Python. Even a simple text editor will suffice. Each chapter provides a ready-made environment where the learner will be able to execute their code and see the results.

The only prerequisites are:

• Intermediate level proficiency in Python 3.x programming
• Basic understanding of the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) data format
• Basic knowledge of command line tools such as curl