APIs and Web Scraping

A data analyst or data scientist doesn’t always get data handed to them in a CSV or via an easily accessible database. Sometimes, you’ve got to go out and get the data you need. The ability to collect unique data sets can really set you apart from the pack, and being able to access APIs and scrape the web for new data stories is the best way to get data nobody else is working with.

In our APIs and Web Scraping course, you’ll learn how to query external data sources using an API and explore the basics of scraping data from the web to acquire your own data sets for analysis.

You will learn about the advantages of APIs, the JSON data format, and how to create and process API requests by using real-world data to find the position of the International Space Station. After learning the fundamentals of a simple API, you will learn to work with a more complex API that involves authentication and POST request. We’ll cover how to authenticate with APIs, and the different types of API requests such as GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE. 

You'll also learn a technique to extract data from webpages using a technique called web scraping, using the requests library and the popular BeautifulSoup Python library to acquire and extract the data you want from a page’s HTML source. In addition to learning web scraping techniques, you will learn how web pages are structured so you can better understand how web scraping works under the hood.

By the end of the course, you'll be able to: