Working with APIs in Python (Fred API)

In this video we show how to make Python talk to an API. We use the FRED API as an example, and write Python code from scratch that is able to fetch data from the API. We go over how to understand API documentation, how to get an API key, how to write a Python class that can talk to, access, and query an API via web requests, and how to visualize and validate the results.

The code for this tutorial can be found at this GitHub link:

Happy coding!

[johndolan]

Thanks for doing this tutorial Michael! Very clear explanations throughout, and a nice intro to python classes. I hope you can create more tutorials like these.

[abrosaa.official]

I really loved how smoothly you explained everything! Thanks

[simonchpmnk]

Great content! Keep up the great work! Nice python coding flavor to a Data Science topic. Learned something new about SDKs.
Topic suggestion: Building on this and put it as a product (maybe with some forecasting) into a Python Dashboard.

[SimonVictor]

I really appreciate this tutorial. Clear and comprehensive!

[djCurtisC]

Really great video - looking forward to future content. Have you done anything with the BLS API (only ask as there is some data not in FRED that needs to be accessed from the source here)? They show some examples using prettytables, but the way you've put everything into a class and then stored the data into a dataframe is much better.

[moussatraore]

Awesome vidéo deserve more views than that!! By the way can you make one for using python and api to retrieve data and analyze them using sql ?

[josephholliman]

I am newer to Python and, as an economist, I am very interested in your data extraction methods. For instance, it appears you are working in Jupyter. I am using Jupyter in the Anaconda suite but the GUI you are using appears different. Could you tell us how you have Jupyter set up? Thanks.

[matiasbg]

como seria el archivo json? coloca un ejemplo

[dddelgado]

Thanks Michael this is very helpful- can you help me with an error: in the block of code with assigning fredpy = FredPy() I am getting the error 'FredPy' object has no attribute url'. I believe I am following everything correctly but unsure of why I am getting this error. The above block of code with the class seems to work fine

[sgqebji]

How did you get the fred extensions in visual studio code?