REST is an architectural style for building distributed hypermedia systems based on HTTP. The core concepts of REST include resources identified by URIs, representations of those resources exchanged via standard HTTP methods like GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE. Effective REST APIs follow architectural values like performance, scalability, loose coupling, and consistency by making resources and relationships between them accessible over HTTP. ASP.NET Web API is a framework for building RESTful services on .NET. It allows creating HTTP-based services using controllers and attributes, supports content negotiation for XML and JSON, and includes features for error handling, message handlers, dependency injection, and testing.