What We’ll Build

In this chapter, we will provide a context for the rest of the book. That context is a simple application for buying and selling cars. We will not build out this application but, in fact, we’ll have only one type of object (Car) and one table in our database. This will allow us to focus on the API rather than getting hung up on database design.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

• What an API is and what it is for
• The backend database that we will use throughout the book
• The application that we will build throughout the book
• The Car object that we will use to demonstrate CRUD operations

We will use only free software, as shown in the Technical requirements section, and we will take advantage of open source utilities such as Dapper and AutoMapper, both introduced in Chapter 1.