REST (Representational State Transfer) is an architectural style for designing networked applications that uses HTTP as the transport protocol and treats everything as a resource accessible via a unique URI. REST APIs enable stateless client-server communication through standard HTTP methods, making them the dominant approach for building web services. The key principle to remember: REST APIs model your application domain as resources, not remote procedures — the URI identifies what resource you're working with, and the HTTP method tells the server what action to take on that resource.

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