REST APIs

REST is a style for designing HTTP APIs around resources, verbs, and stateless communication. It's the dominant pattern for web APIs, and the conventions are worth knowing whether the API is built in FastAPI, Django, or Flask. This lesson covers REST principles, how HTTP methods map to CRUD operations, common status codes, versioning, pagination, filtering, idempotency, authentication options, error formats, and the alternatives (GraphQL, gRPC) to know when REST is the wrong choice.