RESTful Web API Design with Node.js - Second Edition

Explore the practical side of REST to build data-centric applications with Node

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RESTful Web API Design with Node.js - Second Edition

What You Will Learn!

Know what an API is and how it is used in client-server communication
Explore HTTP requests and responses and find out about the various fields that make up these requests and responses
Understand the architectural constraints and properties that make an API RESTful
Use Twitter’s API to tweet and search for tweets
Store Twitter’s data in our database to minimize the use of Twitter’s API
Use Async.js to handle Twitter’s API constraints
Test APIs using Postman and Apache Benchmark
Build the API on the server using Express.js and MongoDB
Find out about the Facebook Graph API, and its structure, resources, and permissions
Be introduced to GitHub API, its use of different representations, the PATCH verb, HATEOAS, and conditional requests
Get security tips to prevent session hijacking vulnerabilities

Description

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.

About the Authors

Saleh Hamadeh works as a full-stack software developer at Redfin, a startup that it is using technology to reinvent real-estate. Earlier in his career, Saleh worked at Yahoo! and BrainJocks. During his college years, Saleh served as president of gt-web dev, a Georgia Tech student organization that teaches web development. He is passionate about the future of the web and wants to continue to work and learn in this field.