REST API: Data Extraction with Python – without Web Scraping

Do you want to extract data from a website? Before using web scraping, you have to check first if this website has an API that gives you access to the data you need. There are several popular platforms that give developers access to their “web services”, also known as “APIs”. So using APIs is the official way for data extraction and doing other automation stuff allowed by such applications. You can even benefit from some APIs to build your own applications. If an API allows you to get the data you want to extract from a website, then you do not need regular web scraping.

REST APIs usually generate output in JSON or XML format because most of programming languages can handle these formats easily. In fact, JSON is very similar to data types in programming languages; for example, it is very similar to Python dictionaries.

Some APIs require authentication to control their usage, using an API Key or Client ID and Client Secret, similar to a username and password, so to speak.

In this course, you will start by learning how to extract data using a very simple currency rate conversion API that does not require any authentication but it will teach you the fundamentals of using REST APIs. After that, you will study more advanced video tutorials on sophisticated APIs such as Yelp and Google Places. You will also learn how to use the REST API client, Postman, to test an API before writing your code.