Module Overview

What You’ll Learn

• Apply core REST principles to real API design decisions
• Design predictable, well-structured API resources and URLs
• Support pagination, filtering, sorting, and search on a collection endpoint

💡 Why this module matters: Building routes that technically work is one thing, designing an API that other developers can pick up and use without reading a manual is another. This module covers the conventions that separate a working API from a well-designed one.

What’s Covered

• REST principles, the ideas underlying nearly every modern HTTP API.
• CRUD, mapping create, read, update, and delete to HTTP methods correctly.
• Resource design, naming and structuring URLs consistently.
• API versioning, changing an API without breaking existing clients.
• Pagination, returning a large collection in manageable pieces.
• Filtering, sorting, and search, letting a client ask for exactly the data it needs.
• REST best practices, tying every convention in this module together.

Hands-On

By the end of this module, you’ll have designed and built a properly versioned REST API with paginated, filterable, sortable collection endpoints, following real-world conventions throughout.

Next module: organizing everything built so far into a properly structured Express application.