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This course will begin our journey into Application Programming Interface(API) Development with Laravel.  In this course, we will be going over topics like:
- Concept of Application Programming Interface (API)  and its benefits, 
- Representational State Transfer (REST) Architecture and its constraints, 
- JSON Web Token (JWT) for authentication, 
- best practices for designing a RESTful API, and much more.

We will be putting this knowledge into practical use by building a Question & Answer Restful API Application.

Application Features

- Users can signup and sign in.
- Users can reset their passwords.
- Authenticated users can post a question.
- Authenticated users can answer a question.
- The question owner can delete his question.
- Answer owner can delete his answer.

This course requires an understanding of PHP and a basic understanding of the Laravel framework. 

By the end of this course, we will be able to begin our journey in creating RESTful APIs in Laravel.

Building a Question & Answer RESTful API Application

## Introduction

In the previous lesson, we could define our routes request handling logic as closures in the route files. In larger applications, the route file will become long and messy. 
We can move the handling logic to "controller" classes to make our application codes neater and easy to understand. 

Controllers are helpful to group-related request handling logic into a single PHP class. For example, a `UserController` class might handle all requests to create, show and delete users' records.

## Basic controller

To create a controller class, we can use the `make:controller` artisan command. This command will place the controller class in the `app/Http/Controllers` directory. 

`php artisan make:controller UserController`

A controller class extends a base controller class, giving us access to features like the `middleware` and `authorize` methods.

We can define a route that points to a controller method in the route file, and when a  request matches this route, it invokes the specified method on the controller class and passes any route parameters to the class method.

# Introduction

In the previous lesson, we could define our routes request handling logic as closures in the route files. In larger applications, the route file will become long and messy. 
We can move the handling logic to "controller" classes to make our application codes neater and easy to understand. 

Controllers are helpful to group-related request handling logic into a single PHP class. For example, a `UserController` class might handle all requests to create, show and delete users' records.

# Basic controller

To create a controller class, we can use the `make:controller` artisan command. This command will place the controller class in the `app/Http/Controllers` directory. 

`php artisan make:controller UserController`

A controller class extends a base controller class, giving us access to features like the `middleware` and `authorize` methods.

We can define a route that points to a controller method in the route file, and when a  request matches this route, it invokes the specified method on the controller class and passes any route parameters to the class method.

Refresher on the concept of controllers in Laravel.

Getting Started

Introduction to API Assessment

Quick Refresher

Authentication

Create Question Endpoints

Create Answer Endpoints

Tags

Database Seeding

Password Reset

Conclusion

Controllers

Introduction

Basic controller