To get the most out of this book

This book is intended to equip you with skills that you can use immediately in your work as a tester or developer. If you want to get the most value that you can out of this book, put the things that you learn into practice as soon as you possibly can. Work through all the exercises in this book, but also try to take the ideas that you learn and put them into practice in the “real world” as well.

This book does not assume a lot of prior knowledge of APIs, or even development and testing principles. As long as you have a basic grasp of web technology and what software development looks like in general, you should be able to follow along with this book and pick up everything that you need. Some of the test scripts in Postman use Javascript, but you don’t need to know much about how that works in order to follow along, although a basic understanding would be helpful. There are examples and challenges throughout the book. They are an important part of the book and in order to get the most out of it, you should take the time to work through them.

Download the example code files

The code bundle for the book is hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/API-Testing-and-Development-with-Postman-Second-Edition. We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Download the color images

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://packt.link/gbp/9781804617908.

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. For example: “The /product endpoint gives information about the products accessed by this API.”

A block of code is set as follows:

openapi: 3.0.1
info:
    title: ToDo List API
    description: Manages ToDo list Tasks
    version: "1.0"
servers:
    -url: https://localhost:5000/todolist/api

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

/carts:
    post:
    get:
        queryParameter:
        username:
    /{cartId}:
        get:
        put:

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

npm install -g newman

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on the screen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. For example: “Click on the Import button and choose the OpenAPI option.”

Warnings or important notes appear like this.

Tips and tricks appear like this.