API-driven business strategies are the hype today, and designing and maintaining web APIs is a task that many developers face in one way or another.

To design web APIs, you need to know what options you have in terms of technology. This is where the knowledge of distributed computing concepts such as REST, RPC, gRPC, and GraphQL comes in handy. These options are often directly compared, although some of them are architectural styles (REST), some are theoretical models (RPC), and others are specific implementations (gRPC, SOAP).

If we take REST for example, it uses the HTTP protocol in a very direct way, and since REST is currently the preferred approach to designing web APIs, using it requires a certain level of comfort with HTTP and other networking protocols.

This is why before talking about RPC and REST, we need a primer on networking.