REST API Design — Prerequisites

What You Need Before Starting

1. Basic understanding of HTTP (required)

You need to know that a request has a method (GET, POST, ...), a URL, headers, and optionally a body, and that a response has a status code, headers, and optionally a body. You don't need to know every method or every status code — that's what this course teaches — just the shape of a request/response pair. If "a request has a method and a URL" sounds unfamiliar, spend 20 minutes on MDN's HTTP overview first.

This platform's own Express technology (in this academy) is ideal prior context — building even one small API with it means every principle in this course maps onto something concrete you've already touched, rather than staying abstract.

2. Recommended: having built at least one basic API

Not required, but genuinely useful. If you've written even a handful of routes — a GET that returns a list, a POST that creates something — you'll recognize immediately why "resources as nouns" or "PUT vs PATCH" matter, because you've probably already made the mistake this course explains how to avoid.

3. Not needed

•Any specific programming language or framework — this course is deliberately language-agnostic. The design principles (resource modeling, status codes, versioning, idempotency) apply identically whether the API is implemented in Node, Python, Go, Java, or anything else.

•Prior API design experience — that's what this course teaches from the ground up.

•Deep HTTP protocol internals (TCP handshakes, HTTP/2 framing, etc.) — this course stays at the application-design level: methods, status codes, headers, URLs, bodies. Protocol internals aren't required to design a good API.

Quick self-check

Can you look at POST /users returning 201 Created and explain, in your own words, what both the method and the status code are telling you? If yes, you're ready to start at Fundamentals. If the status code part is unclear, that's exactly what Fundamentals covers first — no need to look anything up beforehand.