Summary

We’ve come on a bit of a journey in this chapter and started to interact with the world outside our local machines. The techniques we covered will be used throughout the book, so we will get plenty of opportunity to become properly familiar with them.

We started out by looking at how we can work with HTML data over HTTP using the Invoke-WebRequest cmdlet. We saw that this is a complex cmdlet with many options, and we covered the parameters frequently used with it. We focused on authentication, as this will be a key technique required for retrieving and posting data. We also saw that it is difficult to manipulate the data we ingest using this cmdlet, as it is text-based.

We then talked about an easier way to ingest data from servers over a network, using an API. We discussed the common types of API, in particular the most common, REST APIs.

We then looked at the PowerShell cmdlet for working with REST – Invoke-RestMethod. We saw how similar this cmdlet...