The foundational programming topic of data encoding formats is an essential skill for understanding the more advanced concepts like APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and Python programmability. In this course, you will first learn about the two main data encoding formats, XML (extensible markup language) and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), which are commonly used in APIs. This course also introduces YAML, a structured data format and markup language commonly used for configuration files in automation and is gaining popularity due to its ease of readability for humans.

The application programming interface (API) enables unrelated applications to interface with each other without having to understand how each other works or share the same programmatic language. APIs are becoming more commonplace in today’s digital age and are enabling a world of automation and interactivity. Network Engineers need to understand how to leverage APIs as vendors like Cisco are designing APIs for many of their products, enabling the ease of Network Automation and creating more possibilities to interact with 3rd party non-networking products.

Nearly any platform or commercial product comes with some sort of application programming interface (API) capability, many of which are HTTP APIs. These APIs can be used for machine-to-machine communication for network automation and can be the catalyst that you need to fully accelerate your network automation journey. You have seen how you can use Postman for testing and exploring HTTP APIs, but to do anything with the API, while in a programming language like Python, you need to use an HTTP client. One such client, which is presented in this section, is the Requests module for Python.