A little while ago we did a RESTful API lunch’n’learn session. These are the videos that we used.

This video from Stormpath covers a lot from basics to good patterns to use – it’s also good quality and as a speaker he’s quite animated so this kept our attention:

For those people who’ve used more SOAP services this video has been good to help compare approaches – however it does seem as if the presenter prefers SOAP (what else would you expect from Oracle?) so you have to apply your own salt:

Other notes

Here’s a quick overview of the properties of the HTTP verbs (this applies to more than just REST APIs!):

GET – Safe, Idempotent
PUT – Idempotent
DELETE – Idempotent
HEAD – Safe, Idempotent
POST – (none of these)

Safe: Makes no change to the server / performs no action. For e.g. reading an entity is a safe, incrementing a counter or sending an e-mail is not.

Idempotent: Doing this multiple times is the same as it doing it just once. For e.g. “a = 1” is idempotent. “a += 1” is not.