Python Programming

Welcome to this lesson on HTTP requests.

This lesson will serve as a quick introduction to the world of Web programming. This may be useful for you at some point in your degree (and beyond).

I will only cover the very basics of how to send HTTP requests to web servers and process their response. We are only a Python Programming course after all! Web development is a very large topic that would require a course or two to cover.

I will focus more on giving you the fundamental knowledge needed for you to understand how HTTP communication works. Then you will be ready to venture out on your own!

We will start with the basics: what is HTTP? And what do HTTP requests and responses look like?

You will then try to perform HTTP requests and obtain HTTP responses programmatically using Python to get a feel of how it works.

We will then move on to making HTTP requests to and receiving HTTP responses from REST APIs, which is more likely what you need to be doing for modern web development. We will briefly discuss the concept of REST, and how you can perform HTTP requests to REST APIs.

We will also look at a few slightly more advanced topics like authentication and sessions.

Finally I will give some pointers on web development frameworks.

This will be more of the guided tutorial. There are no ‘exercises’ beyond following along and trying out the examples given.

Ready?