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AI Agents · Lesson

REST API Fundamentals for Agent Developers

HTTP methods, status codes, headers, and JSON request/response format.

What Is an HTTP Request?

Every agent that connects to an external service uses HTTP — the language of the web. An HTTP request has three key parts: a method, a URL, and optional headers and a body.

Think of the method as a verb telling the server what you want to do, and the URL as the address of the resource.

import requests

# A simple GET request to a public API
response = requests.get('https://api.example.com/users')
print(response.status_code)  # 200
print(response.text)          # raw JSON string

GET — Fetching Data

GET retrieves data from a server. It should never modify anything. Agents use GET to read user profiles, fetch task lists, or pull configuration data.

You can pass parameters in the URL as a query string using the params argument.

import requests

# Fetch users filtered by role
params = {'role': 'admin', 'page': 1, 'limit': 10}
response = requests.get(
    'https://api.example.com/users',
    params=params
)
# URL becomes: /users?role=admin&page=1&limit=10
data = response.json()
print(data['users'])

All lessons in this course

  1. REST API Fundamentals for Agent Developers
  2. Authentication: API Keys and OAuth
  3. Handling API Responses and Errors
  4. Rate Limiting and Retry Logic
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