A useful and handy aspect of being a modern web developer is knowing how to work with APIs to facilitate communication between different software systems.

In this course, you’ll learn how to create your own RESTful API in a Node.js environment running on an Express server and utilizing a PostgreSQL database. We will use Postman as our API client to interact with the API Server.

REST stands for Representational State Transfer and defines a set of standards for web services. It is an architectural style as well as an approach for communications purposes that is often used in various web services development.

An API is an interface that different software programs use to communicate with each other.

RESTful API is an API that conforms to the REST architectural style and constraints. REST systems are stateless, scalable,cacheable, and have a uniform interface.

RESTful APIs most commonly utilize HTTP requests.Four of the most common HTTP methods are :

GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE, which are the methods by which a developer can create a CRUD system – create, read, update, delete. REST it is an application program interface (API) that makes use of the HTTP requests to GET, PUT, POST and DELETE the data over WWW. (World Wide Web)

The main functions used in any REST-based architecture are:

GET − Provides read-only access to a resource.

PUT − Creates a new resource.

DELETE − Removes a resource.

POST − Updates an existing resource or creates a new resource.

You learn how to:

• Create a new database user account

• Create a database and a table

• Insert data into database

• Build an express server

• Connect to PostgreSQL Database from Node application

• Create Route Functions

• Export route functions into main application file

• Create endpoints for route functions

• Call the web API with Postman and perform CRUD operations