I was finally able to understand REST by learning ruby on rails, specifically going through this tutorial here: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.ht

I was finally able to understand REST by learning ruby on rails, specifically going through this tutorial here: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html So REST is a "standard and accepted" way of structuring your URL paths to make them make intuitive sense. Of course thats not the literal definition. You'll see the term "Resource" thrown around. At a basic level, "things" on the internet like a single static web page article, or a single user signed up for a service would known as a "resource". Let's use a blog as an example. A blog has "authors", "posts", and "comments". These can all be identified as resources of a website. Now think of the interactions you are likely to do with a resource. CRUD comes to mind: Create, Read, Update, Delete. So a RESTful implementation of a simple blog would have an intuitive URL structure that allowed you to Cread, Read, Update, and Delete "resources". Consider these urls: myblog.com/posts/1 myblog.com/posts/1/edit This url structure is the start of a RESTful application. A "post" resource can be identified by its unique id here. One thing that I was unclear about was that you can send different types of "commands" over http right in the header. For example even though myblog.com/posts/1 is just one url, you can actually do multiple things with it: GET, POST, PUT, DELETE So depending on the headers you send, your application can do different things. REST recommends that you GET when you want to "read" a blog post, you PUT when you want to update a resource, and DELETE, when you need to delete the resource. The myblog.com/1/edit is not actually sending the editing commands, its simply GETting the edit "view". The form then should issue a PUT command to update the resource. Hope this makes sense, I've go to go now but I can clarify if you have any more questions.