REST API Resources

All URLs below were fetched and confirmed live during curation. High-trust only: primary specs, original authors, industry-standard design guides, canonical exemplar APIs.

Knowledge

API design & architecture

• Fielding Dissertation, Ch. 5 — Representational State Transfer The primary source: REST’s six architectural constraints, defined by the person who coined REST. Use for: answering “what actually makes an API RESTful” and HATEOAS from first principles. (Author’s own copy; the common ics.uci.edu mirror currently has a TLS cert error.)
• Richardson Maturity Model — Martin Fowler Levels 0–3 (resources → verbs → hypermedia). Use for: framing REST maturity in interviews and arguing where the pragmatic bar sits. Primary read for Lesson 1.
• RFC 9110 — HTTP Semantics (IETF, 2022) The authoritative, current spec for methods, status codes, conditional requests. Use for: definitive wording on semantics (obsoletes RFC 7231).
• MDN — HTTP request methods The safe / idempotent / cacheable matrix per method. Use for: fast, correct recall of GET/PUT/PATCH/DELETE semantics under pressure.
• Microsoft Azure — Web API Design Best Practices Vendor-neutral house-style checklist (resource modeling, filtering, pagination, versioning, async ops); updated 2025. Use for: designing endpoints to a standard.
• Google API Improvement Proposals (AIP) Living, versioned design standard (resource-oriented design, standard methods, long-running ops, error model). Use for: rigorous conventions at scale; RPC vs. resource-oriented contrast.

Security & production

• OWASP API Security Top 10 (2023) Canonical API-specific risks (BOLA, broken auth, BOPLA, resource consumption, SSRF…). Use for: security/threat-modeling questions and hardening review.

Hands-on / exemplar APIs

• Stripe API Reference · Idempotent requests Gold-standard real-world design: clean resources, error format, expandable objects, and the Idempotency-Key pattern. Use for: studying production idempotency, pagination, versioning done right.
• GitHub REST API docs · Pagination Link-header + cursor pagination, rate limiting, date-based versioning, ETags/conditional requests. Use for: comparing pagination strategies at scale.

Books

• Designing Web APIs — Jin, Sahni, Shevat (O’Reilly, 2018) Best single general-purpose API design book for a senior; ages well. Case studies from Slack, Stripe, GitHub. Use for: design, auth, pagination, scaling, DX. Skip as primaries: REST API Design Rulebook (2011, pre-RFC 9110, dated); Web API Design (Apigee) — subsumed by the Azure + Google guides above.

Wisdom (Communities)

• APIs You Won’t Hate Active 2025/26 (newsletter, podcast, members’ Slack); founded by Phil Sturgeon. Use for: current, opinionated senior-level discussion (OpenAPI, versioning, hypermedia, JSON streaming).
• Google AIP repo A living standard debated in public PRs/issues. Use for: watching seasoned engineers argue design trade-offs in writing.

Gaps

• Reddit (r/api, r/ExperiencedDevs): could not verify activity/moderation to a high-trust standard (crawler blocked). Sanity-check manually before relying on them.
• Open vendor-neutral Discord/Slack: thin. Only verified live chat community is the (membership-gated) APIs You Won’t Hate Slack.