I've mentioned the DynamoDB API a few times in this series. This lecture will go into more detail on what that actually means, and how you can integrate DynamoDB into your application code.

There are two ways you can interact with DynamoDB. You can use the Amazon Web Services web console, which provides a graphical interface for administering DynamoDB tables, looking at the data in your tables, and adding and modifying your data. You can also write code which interacts with DynamoDB programmatically. This course will show examples of working with DynamoDB using both approaches.

Your software interacts with DynamoDB using its application programming interface, or API. The API is organized as a set of remote procedure calls or different operations that you can execute on your DynamoDB data. Each operation has a name like CreateTable, a set of parameters that are required like the name of the table to be created, and a set of outputs that are sent back in the response like whether this operation was successful. Amazon provides comprehensive documentation about all of the API methods for DynamoDB on the web, and you can also download them as a PDF.

There are 13 different methods for the DynamoDB API, which can be broken down into 3 categories. The first methods are for managing the tables in your DynamoDB account. There are methods for understanding what tables you have in your account like ListTables and DescribeTable, and methods for making changes to your tables like CreateTable, UpdateTable, and DeleteTable. There are four methods for reading data, GetItem and BatchGetItem, for reading single records by their ID or primary key, and Query [[00:02:00]] and Scan for reading many records using an index. There are four methods for modifying data, PutItem to store a single new record, UpdateItem and DeleteItem to modify or delete a single record, and BatchWriteItem to make many changes at once.

The DynamoDB API is actually a set of HTTP endpoints. This is why it's referred to as a web service. When you make an API call, you are actually making an HTTP request with very specific parameters in a very specific structure. The request has a signature, which is how Amazon authenticates that the call was made by a user with the appropriate permissions. If you call the DescribeTable API method, this is what the HTTP request actually looks like as it goes over the network, and this is what the response looks like.

Fortunately, you probably won't have to work with these HTTP requests and responses directly. There are libraries for most popular programming languages, which make it easy to make calls to the various Amazon Web Services APIs. Amazon provides libraries and software development kits for many common platforms, including Java, .NET, PHP, Python, Ruby, Go, C++, and for mobile development using Android or iOS.

In the examples in this course, we will be working with the Python programming language and the most recent SDK provided by Amazon for Python called Boto3. Don't worry if you have never used Python before. The examples should be very easy to understand. Boto3 code looks very similar to the raw API calls, so these examples should be helpful no matter what language you will be using yourself.