web api is part of website designed to interact with programs that use very specific urls to request certain information this kind of request is called an api call the requested data will be returned in an easily processed formatsuch as json or csv most apps that rely on external data sourcessuch as apps that integrate with social media sitesrely on api calls git and github we'll base our visualization on information from githuba site that allows programmers to collaborate on projects we'll use github' api to request information about python projects on the site and then generate an interactive visualization of the relative popularity of these projects in pygal github (projects git helps people manage their individual work on projectso changes made by one person won' interfere with changes other people are making when you're implementing new feature in projectgit tracks the changes you make to each file when your new code worksyou commit the changes you've madeand git records the new state of your project if you make mistake and want to revert your changesyou can easily return to any previously working state (to learn more about version control using gitsee appendix projects on github are stored in repositorieswhich contain everything associated with the projectits codeinformation on its collaboratorsany issues or bug reportsand so on when users on github like projectthey can "starit to show their support and keep track of projects they might want to use in this we'll write program to automatically download information about the most-starred python projects on githuband then we'll create an informative visualization of these projects requesting data using an api call github' api lets you request wide range of information through api calls to see what an api call looks likeenter the following into your browser' address bar and press enterthis call returns the number of python projects currently hosted on githubas well as information about the most popular python repositories let' examine the call the first partrequest to the part of github' website that responds to api calls the next partsearch/repositoriestells the api to conduct search through all repositories on github the question mark after repositories signals that we're about to pass an argument the stands for queryand the equal sign lets us begin