Hands-on workshop session with Postman to demonstrate usage of APIs and API testing

1. APIs 101 with
Postman
Learn API essentials

2. Postman Student Expert
GDSC Lead
Pranay Narang
@pranay-narang
Who I am

3. Agenda
1 Intro to APIs and Postman
2 Requests and responses
3 Trying things out
4 Follow-up resources
5 Q&A
go.postman.co/build

4. APIs: A Digital Restaurant
Client Server

5. What’s an API?
And why should I use one?
● Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) allow
services to communicate with each other
● Software has become more complex and collaborative
over the years. Developers no longer need to create
every service from scratch.
● APIs allow developers to access data from a service (like
Google or Twitter) without any knowledge of how the
codebase has been implemented.

6. APIs: A bit Technical

7. There’s an API for everything
Everything
● The Cat API
● OpenWeatherMap
● Genius
● Discord
● Youtube-to-MP3
● Spotify
● Twitter
● Facebook
● Google
● And so many more!

8. APIS TURN SOFTWARE INTO LEGO® BRICKS

9. More than 500,000 organizations & 13 Million developers use Postman
98%
of Fortune 500
Organizations use Postman
65%
of Global 2000
Organizations use Postman
Postman is a collaborative API development platform that simplifies
creating, using, and testing APIs with a UI
What is Postman?

10. Working APIs: Then and Now
cURL Command Line Postman

11. Requests and Responses

12. Request-Response Pattern
Client Server
Request
Response
Resources
Services
Network
API

13. Making Requests
The three ingredients to
make a request:
● Method (GET, POST, etc)
● Address/Endpoint (URL)
● Path
How we interact with the API

14. Requests - Methods and Endpoints
Method
GET Retrieve information
POST Send information
PUT/PATCH Update information
DELETE Delete information
address of the server
Bare minimum for a request
https://www.google.com/search
The scheme of
the request
Host
Path
Protocol
destination where
request can be heard
and executed

15. Specifying Detail
Building your requests
● Parameters
○ In the query
● Authorization
● Headers and body
○ Data types

16. Requests - Body
The data payload
● Optional, but often supplied
with POST and PUT requests
● Data types
○ form data
○ JSON
○ text
○ HTML
○ XML
○ files
○ GraphQL
○ … and more!
{
“name”: “Jane Doe”,
“email”: “janedoe@email.com”,
“birthYear”: 1970
}
JSON

17. Receiving Responses
Response elements
● Status codes (200 OK, 201
Created, 404 Not found)
● Headers
● Accessing body data

18. Follow Along
Navigate to and fork
https://tinyurl.com/3vt73u4c

19. Recap
We learned request essentials to
retrieve and update API data:
● Methods
● Addresses
● Parameters
● Authorization
● Body data

20. Continue Learning APIs as a Student
Expert
Student Expert certification indicates that you are proficient in the essential
skills involved in building and testing API requests in Postman, including:
● Sending more sophisticated requests in Postman.
● Editing documentation for a collection.
● Writing basic test scripts.
● Running collections, passing data between requests, and
scripting request execution order.
● Have the option to become a Student Leader in your
community

21. Postman Student Expert
Apply here: https://bit.ly/postman-student-program

22. Win
Amazing
Swag

23. Blog writing competition!
Write what you learned during the
session on your favorite platform like
medium or dev.to
Use #PostmanStudent #PostmanAPI
Send it to us, and we’ll send cool swag to
the coolest blog
Submit your blog URL to organizers
1 2

24. Share your learnings with
#PostmanStudent

25. Resources
learning.postman.com
Learning Center
explore.postman.com
API Network
community.postman.com
Forum

26. Q&A

27. Thanks for coming!
Have a question we didn’t cover? Email me at [your email here]
Tell us how the workshop went:
<Replace with feedback url>