REST API Design Best Practices

Most developers default to REST without much thought. It's the most common API style, supported everywhere, and familiar to nearly every engineer. But "familiar" doesn't mean "easy to get right."

A poorly designed REST API creates friction for everyone who uses it. Endpoints become confusing. Clients write workarounds. Breaking changes sneak in. What should have been a clean integration turns into a maintenance burden.

In this chapter, we'll cover REST API design from the ground up: the principles that make REST work, naming conventions that create consistency, HTTP methods and status codes, request and response patterns, pagination, filtering, versioning, authentication, error handling, and the practices that separate good APIs from great ones.