In a new tutorial from NETTUTS.com today Siddharth gives you a guided tour through some of the Twitter API and includes code - Javascript and PHP (using cURL) - you can use to access it.

As we move towards the social web and mashups, a good API is not a nice addition anymore: it is downright necessary. And remember, too much abstraction is never a good thing. While there are a number of API kits out there to simplify working with the API in question, wouldn't it be cool to know what is actually going on under the hood? Wouldn't it be exciting to deconstruct the actual voodoo going on between the kit and the API? Yeah, I thought so!

He covers the three different Twitter APIs, the REST, search and stream APIs but focuses on using the REST method to pull out the information you need. The code examples show you how to get your own latest status, update your current status and use the search.twitter.com site to find tweets matching your search term and pull them back as a JSON message.