LinkedIn Learning - Building RESTful APIs with Node.js and Express [CoursesGhar]

Before we actually start building our back end and API, let's cover some quick basics around a RESTful API, what it is 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 deep 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 back end using HTTP transactions. We use a series of calls like GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE with an HTML address to transact with our back end and its data. So when a front end client, web, or mobile needs to do transactions with a back end, it makes a call, like for example GET, with an API end point that looks like an HTML URL. And the API responds with a success or a failure with data if need be. We use GET calls to pull the data from a back end. 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 end points 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.