Free Resources
Free Chapters and Guides
The two free chapters below give you a sense of what the book offers. The technical guides are free too, to help you pick up practical tips and techniques.
Free chapters
Two full chapters from the book
Exactly as paying readers get them. No account needed.
Chapter 03Free Your First API Call Make your first real API request in Python, read the JSON that comes back, and understand exactly what happened on the wire. Read free → Chapter 14Free OAuth and Authentication Fundamentals Demystify OAuth 2.0. Walk the authorization-code flow step by step and log a user in against a real provider, no hand-waving. Read free → Projects Six projects you build in the book See what the full book builds, from a resilient weather CLI to a production news API deployed on AWS. See the projects →Free guides
Full-length technical guides
Each guide takes one practical job, from making your first API call to deploying an app, and walks you through it with working code.
Guide How to Call an API in Python Start here. Install requests, make GET and POST calls, send params and headers, read JSON, and handle status codes, with links to deeper guides on each topic. Read free → Guide How to Build an App with AI Turn an app idea into a requirements document, Claude project setup, safe first prompts, and a version 1 build plan you can actually follow. Read free → Guide Handling API Errors in Python Why a 200 is not always success, and how to handle failures at the right layer: status codes, the requests exception hierarchy, raise_for_status, and graceful fallbacks. Read free → Guide requests: Timeouts, Retries, and Backoff Python requests has no timeout or retries by default. How to add both, plus exponential backoff, the right way, with a reusable session you can copy into any project. Read free → Guide Storing API Keys Safely with .env Stop hardcoding secrets. Use a .env file and python-dotenv to keep API keys out of your code and out of version control, locally and in production. Read free → Guide Validating JSON with jsonschema Validate the JSON an API returns before you trust it. Define a schema, catch bad data at the boundary, and know when a simpler check is enough. Read free → Guide OAuth 2.0: The Authorization Code Flow The OAuth dance, demystified. The four roles, the redirect, exchanging a code for tokens, refresh tokens, state, and PKCE, then a complete runnable script and a table of the errors you'll hit. Read free → Guide Using PostgreSQL with Python From the psycopg driver to your first query: connect, run safe parameterized queries that dodge SQL injection, read rows, and handle transactions cleanly. Read free → Guide Flask vs FastAPI A fair, hype-free comparison: sync vs async, type-hint validation, automatic docs, templating, and ecosystem, plus which one to learn first in 2026. Read free → Guide Web App vs Mobile App A practical first-product decision guide: when to build a browser-based web app, when native iOS or Android is worth it, and where PWAs fit. Read free → Guide Testing Real-World Python APIs A complete, hands-on guide to testing API code with pytest: mocking requests, the Flask test client, OAuth flows, and a production test suite. Read free → Guide Local Hosting vs Deployment What actually changes when Python code leaves your laptop: the dev server vs production, what gunicorn is for, and why "it works locally" is not the finish line. Read free → Guide Deploy a Flask App A practical first deployment: add Gunicorn, declare dependencies, set the start command, configure env vars, and take your Flask app live on a managed platform. Read free → Guide How Software Gets to Production Place processes, ports, DNS, HTTPS, Docker, CI/CD, cloud platforms, and Kubernetes on one map, then choose the smallest production shape that fits. Read free → Guide Dockerizing a Python API Write your first Dockerfile line by line, add a .dockerignore, keep secrets out of the image, then build and run your API in a container. Read free → Tool curl to Python Converter Paste a curl command and get clean, runnable Python requests code instantly, in your browser. Handles headers, query params, JSON and form bodies, and auth, with a production-ready mode. Open the tool →Articles
Python and API articles
Shorter reads on a single topic, from a full Spotify project to making many API calls at once.
Tutorial Build a Spotify Music Time Machine A real-world walkthrough of the Spotify API in Python: OAuth login, pulling your listening history, and building a playlist, with current 2026 policy notes. Read free → Article What Changed in the Spotify API in 2026 The Premium requirement for developer apps, the 127.0.0.1 redirect rule, and deprecated endpoints, with how to adapt your Python code. Read free → Article Async Python for API Calls Why requests is synchronous, how asyncio and httpx run many calls at once, and when async is worth the extra complexity. Read free →