What are the best resources to learn Magento API?

Question

Are there any complete tutorials/books/blogs available for learn Magento API from the beginning? Any suggestions will be appreciated.

Answer 1

Actually it's pretty hard to find good Magento API resources.

For learning about the SOAP API, I used/can recommend:

• magentocommerce.com: Magento API (there were lots of mistakes on the old version of this website, hope it's better now)
• Alan Storm: The Magento API
• Inchoo: Magento API v2
• agoraDesign: Creating or updating products
• Magento SOAP call (german resource)
• stackoverflow/stackexchange questions ;-)

Actually this is a list of the visited websites from my PC ;)

And of course I learned the most with debugging and testing.

Answer 2

Reading through each section of the below is a good starting point:

http://www.magentocommerce.com/api/soap/introduction.html

And then the below after:

http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/doc/webservices-api/custom-api

Answer 3

I read the most for learning about the API from here:

http://www.magentocommerce.com/api/soap/introduction.html

http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/5_-_modules_and_development/0_-_module_development_in_magento/introduction

Answer 4

Another very good article with regards to Magento API has been written by Inchoo:

http://inchoo.net/ecommerce/magento/magento-v2-soap-demystified/

They list the differences between the APIs which exist in Magento starting at the basics like "What is a WSDL", "How to access Magento by creating a role and user", "Differences between API v1 and v2" and also include screenshots of where to find the resources.

This article helped me a lot when I programmed my first API methods.