Connect and Transform External Data Seamlessly

Overview

Connect and Transform External Data Seamlessly is an intermediate course for developers and data professionals who need to build reliable pipelines from external data sources. In a connected world, simply accessing an API isn't enough; you must do it securely and be able to use the data you retrieve. This course provides the essential skills to master both sides of that equation: secure connection and effective transformation. Drawing on real-world best practices for REST API security and data engineering, you will get hands-on with the OAuth 2.0 protocol. You will learn how to implement secure authentication flows to manage access tokens and protect sensitive credentials. Next, you will dive into the practical challenge of data transformation, learning to parse and flatten complex, nested JSON into a clean, relational format ready for analysis in databases like BigQuery or PostgreSQL. By the end of this course, you will be able to confidently and securely integrate third-party data into your applications and analytics workflows.

Syllabus

Secure Connections with OAuth 2.0

This module provides a practical guide to the modern standard for API security: OAuth 2.0. Learners will move beyond risky hardcoded API keys and apply the OAuth 2.0 protocol to securely authenticate to an external service, manage access tokens, and understand the complete authentication workflow, drawing on best practices from the Azure and DreamFactory case studies.

Transforming Nested JSON to Relational Data

In this module, you will learn the essential data engineering skill of making API data usable. Modern APIs often return complex, nested JSON, which is difficult to analyze. You will apply JSON parsing techniques to flatten this data into a clean, relational (row-and-column) format, ready for storage and analysis, inspired by the dbt and PostgreSQL case studies.