REST is an approach to understanding what scalable, web architecture design. These links will help your to orient yourself to the ongoing discussion on REST and its intellectual history.

• Roy Fielding's dissertation on REST. Chapter 5 is especially relevant. There is also a separate publication titled Principled Design of theModernWeb Architecture that is pretty much an excerpt of Chapter 5 of Roy Fielding's thesis.
• The REST Wiki and my home page on that wiki where I talk about my own thinking on REST and web architecture.
• The HTTP/1.1 RFC and the W3C home page for the HTTP protocol.
• An article by Roger L. Costello titled Building Web Services the REST Way and a wiki page on the same topic.
• A work in progress by Mark Baker on the relationship between the REST hypermedia model and workflow.
• Two articles by Paul Prescod on REST that appeared on XML.com
  1. REST and the Real World.
  2. Second Generation Web Services.
• The REST discussion group on Yahoo.
• A publication at Extreme Markup 2004 that investigates extensible and scalable subresource addressing using Server-Side XPointer and the HTTP "Range" header by Bryan Thompson, Graham Moore, Bijan Parsia and Brad Bebee in HTML or PDF .