I would like to apologize first if the question is a total newbie question, but I really am a total newbie on this.
I'm a student and I recently have joined a project that involves studying (mining) tweets. The project head asked me to use the Twitter API to extract tweets. What exactly is Twitter API and how can I use it? What do I need to know to start using it?
Twitter allows you to interact with its data ie tweets & several attributes about tweets using Twitter APIs. You'd need to know a server side scripting language like php, python or ruby to make requests to twitter api and results would be in JSON format that can be easily read by your program.
A good starting point would be reading the official documentation at https://dev.twitter.com/ itself.