A Developer's Guide to Building Well-Designed REST APIs Over HTTP

A technical guide published on DEV Community outlines best practices for designing REST APIs based on HTTP, referencing Roy Fielding's 2000 doctoral dissertation that originally defined REST as an architectural style. The guide explains core REST constraints including statelessness, cacheability, client-server separation, and the uniform interface principle. It emphasizes modeling APIs around resources and URIs rather than action-based endpoints, using HTTP methods such as GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE to carry intent. Topics covered include versioning, pagination, error handling, security basics, and the Richardson Maturity Model for evaluating API maturity. The guide also acknowledges that most real-world APIs adopt a pragmatic subset of REST constraints, often skipping HATEOAS entirely, and uses ASP.NET Core for code examples.