Summary

This chapter introduced REST APIs, a fundamental building block in most real-world web applications. These APIs facilitate communication between the backend server and the web browser, so they are central to your growth as a Django web developer. We learned how to serialize data in our database so that it can be transmitted via an HTTP request. Next, we learned about the various options DRF gives us to simplify the code we write, taking advantage of the existing definitions of the models themselves. We also covered ViewSets and routers and saw how they can be used to condense code even further by combining the functionality of multiple views. Finally, we learned about authentication and authorization and implemented token-based authentication for the book review app.

In the next chapter, we will extend Bookr’s functionality for its users by learning how to generate CSVs, PDFs, and other binary file types.