Hi, I hope this is the best section for this post. First of all, I'm not a programmer. I know HTML, and can usually modify CSS and even some PHP successfully. I want to learn to use APIs. One in particular is Shopzilla's. Can anyone direct me to a good reference / introduction to using APIs, either a book or website? Any help is greatly appreciated.
There are so many different ways that APIs can be implemented from both sides of the fence that there really isnt much of a universal guide. The best is to see if the particular API you want to use is based on REST or SOAP etc have a read on using that method with your chosen programming language to give you background then it should just be a case of reading the APIs document and reference
Thanks so much for taking the time to reply. I looked at their API guide and see no reference to REST or SOAP. What it does say is that it is an XML API. Can you tell me any more from that? One other thing. I'm not sure what programming language I could use. I want to implement this on a blog that's on the Typepad platform, which doesn't support PHP. You can use Javascript on Typepad though.
Unfortunately you cannot get access to the guide without signing up and your application must be manually approved before they give you access so cant get access to the guides to see how they are running it. There are certainly APIs that can be run purely by javascript however as all javascript is sent client side you may have to expose identification keys etc that you may not want to and other APIs would be exceptionally difficult (if at all possible) to code in pure javascript.