Designing RESTful APIs

Welcome! In this lesson, you'll learn about RESTful APIs, a fundamental way to design web services. REST stands for Representational State Transfer.

Think of an API as a menu in a restaurant. You make a request (order food), and the kitchen (server) sends back a response (your meal). REST defines a set of rules for how this communication should happen over the internet.

RESTful APIs are built around a few core ideas:

• Resources: Everything is a 'resource' (e.g., a user, a product).
• Unique URIs: Each resource has a unique address (a URL or URI).
• Standard Methods: HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) are used to perform actions on resources.
• Statelessness: Each request from a client to a server must contain all the information needed to understand the request. The server doesn't store client 'session' state between requests.