Consuming HTTP, JSON, and XML APIs in Python Course
Course Summary
What students are saying
Source code and course GitHub repository
github.com/mikeckennedy/consuming_services_python_demosWhat's this course about and how is it different?
The goal of this online video course is to show you how to integrate with a variety of HTTP based web services.
As you know, it's a services world out there. There are literally 1,000's of amazing APIs you can integrate into your applications. Whether it's Slack or Twilio to add communication, GitHub, Trello, or BitBucket for development and deployment, or even Stripe for payments, you can dramatically boost your application's features and power by adding services.
In addition to learning the APIs to integrate HTTP, REST, XML, SOAP services and web scraping into your application, you will learn the theory and concepts behind.
You'll even learn to work with a number of data formats including JSON, XML, HTML, SOAP (details below).
View the full course outline.
Who is this course for?
It's for people who have some programming / scripting experience and want to improve their Python knowledge. Maybe you:
- Want to add services to your local apps or your web apps
- Are a developer adding integration with existing services
- Are a data scientists looking to harvest data from the internet
- Are a developer who needs to integrate with legacy SOAP services
- Would like to understand the concepts behind HTTP / REST services
If any of those descriptions fit you, then you're my target student. I wrote this course for you.
What services will we use?
We will create a number of demo applications in Python throughout this course. These applications will integrate with a variety of services and work with a number of data formats including:
- GitHub (list public repos for a user)
api.github.com
-
Blog explorer (three versions: requests, py2, py3)
consumer_services_api.talkpython.fm
-
RSS Feed Reader
talkpython.fm/rss
-
MP3 / podcast downloader (binary file examples)
talkpython.fm
-
Course Playground Service
HTTP / REST version: /api/blog
HTTP / REST version (auth): /api/restricted/blog
SOAP version: /soap?wsdl
-
Scraping and analyzing 80 hours of transcripts on talkpython.fm
E.g. https://talkpython.fm/episodes/transcript/67/property-based-testing-with-hypothesis
What data formats will we learn to process?
In addition to working with requests, urllib, beautifulsoup4, you will learn how to work with a number of data and file formats in Python including.
JSON
- via the HTTP APIs
- via the file system
XML
- custom formats via the file system
- via RSS
- via sitemaps
- SOAP services descriptions and messages
HTML
- via basic GET requests
- parsing deeply to convert web pages to "APIs"
Concepts backed by concise visuals
This course is hands-on. You will see virtually all the code written from scratch and we will be accessing publicly available services. Everything you see me type or do, you can reproduce. And you should follow along!
However, sometimes you need to see the big picture. That's why all the major concepts in the course are backed by concise visuals.
Here's an example for when we will first talk about screen scraping with Beautiful Soup.
Follow along with subtitles and transcripts
Each course comes with subtitles and full transcripts. The transcripts are available as a separate searchable page for each lecture. They also are available in course-wide search results to help you find just the right lecture.
Who am I? Why should you take my course?
My name is Michael, nice to meet you. ;) There are a couple of reasons I'm especially qualified to teach you Python.
1. I'm the host of the #1 podcast on Python called Talk Python To Me. Over there, I've interviewed many of the leaders and creators in the Python community. I bring that perspective to all the courses I create.
2. I've been a professional software trainer for over 10 years. I have taught literally thousands of professional developers in hundreds of courses throughout the world.
3. Students have loved my courses. Here are just a few quotes from past students of mine.
"Michael is super knowledgeable, loves his craft, and he conveys it all well. I would highly recommend his training class anytime." - Robert F.
"Michael is simply an outstanding instructor." - Kevin R.
"Michael was an encyclopedia for the deep inner workings of Python. Very impressive." - Neal L.
Free office hours keep you from getting stuck
One of the challenges of self-paced online learning is getting stuck. It can be hard to get the help you need to get unstuck.
That's why at Talk Python Training, we offer live, online office hours. You drop in and join a group of fellow students to chat about your course progress and see solutions via screen sharing.
Just visit your account page to see the upcoming office hour schedule.
Is this course based on Python 3 or Python 2?
This course is based upon Python 3. Python 2 is officially unsupported as of January 1st, 2020 and we believe that it would be ill-advised to teach or learn Python 2. This course is, and has always been, built around Python 3.
The time to act is now
Begin taking advantage of the thousands of amazing services you can use in your app today.