Designing and Building REST APIs

What you'll learn

• Design resource-oriented REST endpoints that are predictable and consistent
• Choose the right HTTP methods and status codes for every operation
• Secure an API with authentication and sensible authorisation
• Handle pagination, filtering, and versioning for real-world scale
• Document your API so other developers can integrate without asking you

About this course

Almost every modern product talks to an API, and the difference between an API people enjoy using and one they fight with comes down to design. This course teaches you to design and build REST APIs the way experienced engineers do — clean, consistent, secure, and documented. You'll start with REST principles and resource modelling: naming, structure, and the HTTP methods and status codes that make an API predictable. You'll build endpoints that behave consistently, then add the concerns that real usage demands — authentication and authorisation, validation and error shapes, pagination, filtering, and versioning so you can evolve without breaking clients. Finally you'll document the API clearly, so other developers can integrate against it on their own. This is for developers who can write backend code and now want to design interfaces others depend on. The principles are language-agnostic, with concrete examples you can apply to any stack. By the end you'll have designed and built a documented REST API you'd be happy to hand to another team.