From the course: Building RESTful APIs with Node.js and Express

RESTful APIs refresher

From the course: Building RESTful APIs with Node.js and Express

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RESTful APIs refresher

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- [Narrator] Before we actually start building our backend and API, let's cover some quick basics around RESTful API, what is it, and how we're going to build our application around it. Keep in mind this is a quick overview of what a RESTful API is. And if you need a deeper understanding, take a look at learning RESTful APIs in our library. Also, feel free to skip this video if you're fairly familiar with the subject. So in a nutshell, a RESTful API is a way to transact with a backend using HTTP transactions. We use a series of calls like get, post, put, and delete with a HTML address to transact with our backend and its data. So when a front-end client web mobile needs to do transactions with a backend, it makes a call, like for example, get with an API endpoint that looks like an HTML URL and the API responds with success or failure with data if need be. We use get calls to pull the data from a backend. Then if we need to add new data, we use post. Next, if we need to update the data, we use put. And finally, delete. Well, if you need to delete data. If you're really new to APIs and endpoints and you're not quite grasping how these work, I'll point out these items as we build our application to make sure they make sense as we implement our API.

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