RESTful Web APIs allow developers to create unprecedented applications by leveraging the data on the internet. Since javascript is the language of the web, building APIs using Node.js provides a seamless development experience on both the front end and the back end.

This video course gives you an overview of a RESTful API and goes through the logical steps of building one. It explores three different APIs, focusing on their similarities and differences to effectively implement one.

We’ll start off by defining APIs, showing you how they can be built on top of HTTP, and listing the properties that make an API RESTful. We will develop Twitter Notes, a web application that lets its users leave notes for their Twitter friends. We will use Twitter’s API to implement a login flow and then design a web API. In addition to using Twitter’s API, we will take a closer look at two other real-world APIs—Facebook API and GitHub API. Finally, we’ll look at some best practices to keep the APIs secure, maintainable, and performing.

By the end of this course, you will have a good grasp of APIs, HTTP, REST, OAuth 1.0a, API testing, and site reliability, performance, and security. Since the course explores three different REST APIs, you will reach a level where you will be comfortable using any RESTful API, even if it does not have an SDK.