Introduction to APIs via Postman
Tags: postmanstudent, postmanapi, api, postman
Published: 2023-03-12 13:42:37

Recently, I had the pleasure of attending an **_"API 101 with Postman"_** session. As a newcomer to the world of APIs, I was eager to learn about Postman's capabilities and how it can streamline the API testing and development process. In this blog post, I'll share my experience attending the session and provide a comprehensive overview of Postman API.

<u>About the speaker:</u>
The session was conducted by [Divyansh Pratap Singh](https://www.linkedin.com/in/pratap-divyansh), who has an extensive experience in API testing and automation. 

![Speaker information](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/3fvmxefzi90vp1n6w7ib.png)

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## Agenda of the session:

  1. Intro to APIs and Postman .
  2. Requests and responses.
  3. Hands-on session.
  4. Follow-up resources.

####What's an API ?
Software has become more complex and collaborative over the years. Developers no longer need to create every services from scratch.
Application Programming Interfaces(APIs) allow developers to access data from a service (like Google or twitter) without any kowledge of how the codebase has been implemented.

`APIs allow services to communicate with each other.`

####Types of APIs:

- Hardware APIs
- Software Library APIs 
- Web APIs

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**Request-Response Pattern**

![A picture showing how client interacts with the server via network](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/aqbxjq3y8h8owkj749gg.png)

####What is Postman?
Postman is a collaborative API development platform that simplifies creating, using and testing APIs with an interactive UI.

> More than 500,000 organizations & 13 million developers use Postman.

One of the main reasons for the increased Popularity of the Postman is because of its interface :

![Working APIs: Then vs Now](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/gx9zbnm7auf6rd8l3kz2.png)

[Refer this link](https://www.postman.com/) for simply creating your postman account.

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###Making Requests (Interact with the API) : 
We were then shown how to send requests to APIs using different HTTP methods, such as GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE.
The 3 ingredients to make a request:
- Methods (GET,POST,etc.)
- Address / Endpoint (URL)
- Path



![Requests - Methods and Endpoints ](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/kp6dpm2ox6w7i2z1brlp.png)

#####The response elements for Receiving Requests are : 
 - Status Codes (200 OK , 201 CREATED , 404 NOT FOUND)
 - Headers
 - Accessing body data

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## Resources

> [Learning Center ](https://https://learning.postman.com/)
> [API Network](https://https://explore.postman.com/)
> [Forum ](https://https://community.postman.com/)

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Attending the Introduction to Postman API session was a great learning experience. We learned about the basics of API with Postman and got hands-on experience with various features of the tool.



Apart from this, we also got to know about the Postman Student Expert Certification which will help us take Postman skills to the next level and showcase our expertise to the world.
![Postman programs for Students](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/lu4ae712qyz1pee7clr9.jpeg)
[Click Here](https://www.postman.com/student-program/) to explore more about Postman Student Programs.

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Feel free to share this article with your peers and do hit a ❤️ if you liked my blog. If you have any query about how to get started with Postman , feel free to ask them in the comment section.


**You can also connect with me on [LinkedIn](https://linkedin.com/in/adi-ray)**