This document provides an overview of REST (Representational State Transfer) web services. It discusses that REST was proposed by Roy Fielding and uses HTTP for communication. The key aspects of REST covered are that it uses a stateless, client-server architecture and standard HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) to operate on resources identified by URIs. The document also discusses REST characteristics like being web-based, using HTTP for the protocol, having no formal service definition, and following best practices for resource-based URIs, HTTP methods and status codes.