00:00 We've seen how to poke at our API

00:02 with just doing a GET request.

00:03 We've seen Postman lets us explore better

00:06 but if we want to access it from code, we need another way.

00:09 Now, Python has a built in mechanism

00:12 for accessing HTTP APIs

00:14 but it's not the prettiest thing in the world.

00:16 So a guy named Kenneth Reitz created

00:19 this thing called Requests.

00:20 Maybe you've heard of it.

00:21 It's definitely one of the most popular packages, period.

00:25 And to use it is really, really simple.

00:27 We're going to use it in just a moment.

00:28 If you want to get a URL, you just say GET.

00:30 Here you can even pass the auth,

00:31 check the status code, check the encoding, check the text,

00:34 and even convert the JSON back to Python dictionaries.

00:37 So this is a very popular library.

00:39 It's definitely the most-used for accessing HTTP services

00:43 or Python directly.

00:44 So, unless for some reason, you are very adverse

00:46 to having a dependency on an external package,

00:48 this is the way,

00:49 this is the way we're going to do it in Python.

00:51 So, next up, let's get started

00:53 and actually write some code.