REST is an architectural style for implementing communication between the application client and server over HTTP. RESTful APIs use HTTP verbs (POST, GET, PUT, DELETE, and so on) to dictate the operation to be performed (Create, Read, Update, Delete) by the server on the domain entity. The REST style has become the de facto standard for creating services in modern application development. This makes it easy to use and consume services in any technology and on any platform, such as web frontends, desktop applications, or other web services.

In this chapter, you'll learn how to create RESTful APIs using ASP.NET Core. We will cover the following topics:

• An overview of REST APIs with the ASP.NET Core API
• Inspecting and debugging your API with Postman and Fiddler
• Defining routing rules in your API
• Binding data into model types and validating them
• Generating a response for different types

We'll first start with an overview of how REST APIs are implemented in ASP.NET Core.