[voiceofunreason]

REST is the architectural style of the World Wide Web: browsers reading cached copies of web pages that link to other web pages.

So almost any site you hit with your browser is a "RESTful API". Another decent example is Atom Syndication / Atom Publishing.

The best introduction that I've found is Jim Webber's 2011 talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQVSzMV8DWc&t=3m8s Jon Moore's 2010 Hypermedia APIs talk is also good https://vimeo.com/20781278

Unfortunately, a second idea appeared, that embraced the label "REST" but used it to mean something else (roughly, a set of conventions for how to organize web pages and the edits one makes to web pages). And the second idea was written and shared with a much larger audience than the first (in addition to being an "easier" idea), so it grabbed a super majority of the mind share.

[randomdata]

> So almost any site you hit with your browser is a "RESTful API".

I said something to that effect in a job interview once when the topic of REST came up. I was looked at like I had two heads.