The tutorial provides a comprehensive guide for beginners on how to use APIs with Java, focusing on Java REST APIs, which are interfaces that facilitate communication between software. It explains the basic concepts of APIs, including their structure, types of requests, and the REST architectural style, which emphasizes client-server separation, statelessness, cacheability, and a uniform interface. The guide also outlines the steps to start using APIs with Java through the RapidAPI platform, which hosts over 10,000 APIs, and describes how to handle JSON responses using libraries like Unirest and GSON. Practical examples, such as retrieving movie data from the IMDb database and generating memes, are provided to demonstrate how to implement API requests and process responses in Java.