Right now, I am working through Mark Winteringham's Introduction to HTTP, accessible when you purchase the Ministry of Testing's Professional Membership.
The Introduction to HTTP course covers:
- What is a Web Service, as according to the World Wide Web Consortium.
- URIs -- Uniform Resource Identifier -- with their scheme (http, https, ftp, smtp, etc), host, port, resource, and query string
- HTTP Methods such as Get, Post, Put, Patch, and Delete. See the Mozilla Developer Network article on HTTP Request Methods. Example: GET restful-booker.herokuapp:80/booking
- Find out all the options of the URI by sending OPTIONS to it, such as OPTIONS restful-booker.herokuapp:80/booking.
- HTTP Status Codes such as 200 OK, 201 Created, 401 Unauthorized, 404 Not Found, 500 Internal Server Error, 503 Web Service Down. Examples of Status codes: httpstatusdogs.com and http.cat
- HTTP Response Bodies containing the response you requested in JSON Objects containing key and values, XML elements containing values and tags, URL Encoded format.
- Testing Payloads using Elisabeth Hendrickson ( @TestObsessed ) Test Heuristics Cheat Sheet and the Big List of Naughty Strings.
- HTTP Headers such as Content-Length: 195, Connection: keep-alive, Content-Type: application/json, User-Agent: Mozilla/1.22, Accept:text/html, Accept-Language: en-GB, and Cookie.
- Authorization, and Authentication.
It's really interesting how Mark, the @2bittester, created his own test API, the Restful-Booker: An API Playground, which purposely contains errors that testers can discover using tools such as Postman to interact with it.
I love Mark's work! Mark collaborated with Richard Bradshaw, the @FriendlyTester, head of the Ministry of Testing, to create free courses in AutomationInTesting.com and the companion site you can explore, AutomationInTesting.online, which offers the "Shady Meadows Bed & Breakfast", a website that uses the purposely flawed Restful-Booker.
Happy Testing!
-T.J. Maher
Sr. QA Engineer, Software Engineer in Test
Meetup Organizer, Ministry of Testing - Boston
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