REST stands for Representational State Transfer, which is simply an architectural philosophy that is implemented while designing APIs. Web application APIs following the REST style are referred to as a REST API. For example, GitHub's Developer API is a REST API since it follows REST style.
Now let's go through a few concepts of REST APIs.
These are some concepts that we need to understand before we get started with testing REST APIs:
URIs
URI format
Resource modeling
REST APIs make use of Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) to access resources.
For example, https://api.github.com/users/PacktPublishing.
This format is very easy to understand and is readable to a normal human being. Here, it is understandable that the client is requesting data of the user, which is PacktPublishing
in this case.