Refer to Building your first API using the AWS CLI recipe to learn about the API creation properties and REST and HTTP basics.
To understand CloudFormation basics, you may refer to the There's more section of the recipe Building your first Lambda with Amazon CloudFormation from Chapter 1, Getting Started with Serverless Computing on AWS.
For additional CloudFormation concepts, such as pseudo parameters, you can refer to the recipe Using AWS SDK, Amazon CloudFormationand AWS CLI with Lambda of Chapter 1, Getting Started with Serverless Computing on AWS.