This document provides instructions for building a Rails API and discusses related topics. It recommends using Rails 3.1 and Ruby 1.9.2 to build the API. It provides steps to generate a MessagesController to handle API requests for messages. It discusses testing the API with curl and rspec tests. It also covers building a namespaced and versioned API, authentication, caching responses, hosting on DotCloud, and running background jobs with Delayed Job.