Accessing Group Chat

I'm very new to programming in general so please dumb down and answers if you can, but I have some knowledge in Jquery and HTML. This probably isn't the best place to start learning about programming, but I want to make a site or chrome extension for my clan. Mostly, I just want to have access to the group chat so that I could parse through it and add features. The only problem is I don't have any experience with the API or really with requesting in general. Any tips or jumping off points?