Introduction to REST APIs for Absolute Beginners

Course Curriculum

Chapter 1: Introduction to APIs

Lecture 1: Brief history of APIs

Lecture 2: Why do we need APIs? An example RPC call

Lecture 3: Welcome to the course – please watch!

Chapter 2: Building HTTP requests with Postman

Lecture 1: Section overview

Lecture 2: HTTP message structure

Lecture 3: HTTP request method (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, …)

Lecture 4: Introduction to Postman (tool for working with APIs)

Lecture 5: What are query parameters? …

Lecture 6: What are path parameters? …

Lecture 7: HTTP headers

Lecture 8: HTTP headers: Content-Type header

Lecture 9: HTTP headers: Authorization header

Lecture 10: HTTP headers: Cookie header (Cookies)

Lecture 11: HTTP body

Lecture 12: HTTP status code (200, 301, 401, 403, 404, …)

Lecture 13: Conclusion

Chapter 3: Working with REST APIs in Postman

Lecture 1: Section overview

Lecture 2: What is REST?

Lecture 3: What is a resource?

Lecture 4: Hands-on API Car fleet management

Lecture 5: What is JSON?

Lecture 6: API Documentation

Lecture 7: What is Swagger?

Lecture 8: How to create a GET request – Part I

Lecture 9: How to create a GET request – Part II

Lecture 10: Assignment – GET

Lecture 11: Assignment solution – GET

Lecture 12: Invalid JSON

Lecture 13: How to create a POST request

Lecture 14: Common errors

Lecture 15: Assignment POST

Lecture 16: Assignment solution – POST

Lecture 17: GET vs POST & What is a Cache

Lecture 18: How to create a PUT request

Lecture 19: POST vs PUT

Lecture 20: Assignment DELETE

Lecture 21: Assignment solution DELETE

Lecture 22: What is CRUD?

Lecture 23: Which HTTP verb to use

Chapter 4: How to upload a file through an API (Giphy)

Lecture 1: Section overview

Lecture 2: What is Giphy?

Lecture 3: How to search for GIFs using the API

Lecture 4: How to get a GIF through the API

Lecture 5: How to create a GIF (optional)

Lecture 6: How to upload a file using Postman

Lecture 7: Assignment

Lecture 8: Assignment solution

Lecture 9: Postman collection for Giphy

Lecture 10: Clean-up

Chapter 5: Working with GraphQL APIs in Postman

Lecture 1: Resources for this section

Lecture 2: Introduction to GraphQL

Lecture 3: How to use GraphQL from Postman (GitHub API)

Lecture 4: How to use variables with GraphQL

Chapter 6: Conclusion

Lecture 1: Conclusion

Lecture 2: Bonus Lecture