Since one of the more common ways to access data is through a RESTful API, one library that you'll want to be aware of is the Python Requests library, http://www.python-requests.org/en/latest/. Dubbed HTTP for humans, it makes interacting with APIs a clean and simple experience.

Let's take a look at a sample interaction, using requests to pull down data from GitHub's API. Here, we will make a call to the API and request a list of starred repositories for a user:

import requests r = requests.get(r"https://api.github.com/users/acombs/starred") r.json() 

This will return a JSON of all the repositories the user has starred, along with attributes about each. Here is a snippet of the output for the preceding call:

The requests library has an amazing number of features—far too many to cover here, but I do suggest you check out the documentation.