Introduction to the Course

Get an overview of the course and its intended audience, prerequisites, and learning objectives.

We'll cover the following

What's this course about?

Whenever you're planning to buy tickets for a live concert or want to book the front row seats for a baseball game, it's always helpful to use a service that helps you look up such events and provide the best ticket deals. One such service is SeatGeek, which provides the best deals for live events and is quite popular in the US and Canada. The SeatGeek API is a powerful search tool that developers can integrate into their applications to look up live events and performers.

This course provides a quick overview of the SeatGeek API and the different endpoints it provides—for example, for searching events, venues, performers, and so on. By the end of this course, you'll be able to integrate the SeatGeek API into a working application for providing optimized live event searches for your users.

What’s an API?

Before delving into how the SeatGeek API works, it’s important to know what an APIApplication Programming Interface is and understand some of its protocols. An API is a software gateway that allows different software components to communicate with each other. It helps expose the capabilities of an application to the outer world, allowing for programmatic access to the application’s data.

Consider the case of an application service like the SeatGeek API that provides ticketing information. Building and exposing an API for this service will allow others to programmatically fetch the data this service offers, such as the ticket prices for a live concert. Many popular services like YouTube, Reddit, and Google Maps also provide APIs for extended use cases. These services allow authorized clients to access the resources provided by them.

The intended audience for this course includes the following:

  • Beginners who want to explore the SeatGeek API and use it in their first project.
  • Intermediate learners who want to integrate a powerful search tool for finding events across North America.
  • Professionals who have ample experience working with other ticket search APIs and want to integrate the SeatGeek API into their projects.

Prerequisites

This course requires an intermediate knowledge of JavaScript. We also assume you are well-versed in HTTP requests and JSON objects, as we’ll make many API calls using HTTP requests. It is also helpful to have some proficiency with JavaScript’s React framework for the project at the end of the course and are familiar with Airbnb’s code style guide for React applications. It also requires basic knowledge of API architecture.

Learning objectives

By the end of the course, you'll be able to:

  • Understand the different API services provided by the SeatGeek API.

  • Fetch information about live events, venues, and performers.

  • Explore the many search parameters on SeatGeek to provide the most optimized results for the user.

  • Explore a simple React web application integrated with the SeatGeek API.