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Preparations

With the basics of HTTP out of the way, let's get acquainted with the tools we'll use in this book to demonstrate how HTTP works. This section goes through a few tools you'll need to follow along. Note that you only need one of the tools listed. It is important to note that you will be able to follow this book regardless of what tool you use, so pick one that you're comfortable with and get started!

HTTP GUI Tools

We'll make heavy use of Graphical HTTP tools throughout this book. There are lots of options available in this category of HTTP tools, and we'll be using RapidAPI, also known as Paw.

That said, there are many other alternatives out there. Some other capable options are Insomnia and Postman; they're both free and they work on OS X, Windows, and Ubuntu.

HTTP Command line Tools

curl is a free command line tool that is used to issue HTTP requests.

Mac OS X/Linux :

It is shipped with OS X and most GNU/Linux distributions, and you can simply invoke it on the command line by issuing the command below.

$ curl www.google.com

Windows:

If you have version 1803 or later of Windows 10, cURL should be installed by default. If you have an earlier version of windows or cannot find cURL on your version, we recommend installing a GUI version of cURL. You won't be able to execute the command line commands, but you should still be able to perform the appropriate actions in the GUI.

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