Software engineering has a wide variety of applications, but the industry for web programming is by far the largest. Here we’ll learn how to make our code communicate with other code over the internet, how to make that interaction painless and safe, and how to use programming to make common webpages accessible to our programs.

Web data formats

All data going over the internet has an encoding, and we’ll learn the most common ones. We’ll also learn how to use the requests library to make HTTP requests, and how to parse the responses. Those responses will be in either HTML for humans, or json for other programs, and we’ll learn how to easily handle both. Finally, we’ll be demystifying servers and APIs, and how to use them to get the data we need.