I took the dive into the Canvas API about a year ago. I used this link as a resource:
https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Developers-Group/Canvas-APIs-Getting-started-the-practical...
It was good, but it wasn't as great for me as the comments in that thread suggested it would be. By the time I got to the end of the page, I still felt like I didn't actually know how to do anything.
(And I actually recommend against reading the documentation to start. I know it's a common recommendation, but I have found that you need a certain threshold of background knowledge/experience before you the documentation is helpful, and a lot of people don't meet that threshold.)
I came to this with 20-something years of general programming experience (mostly in Python, though I dabbled in other languages) but absolutely zero API experience. I was initially thinking that the API something like a programming language for Canvas, but that's not quite what it is. There is a limited number of very rigid commands you can give the API, and you have to figure out how to do what you want to do within the confines of those commands. However, you can use an actual programming language to do execute complex sequences of API commands and do things with whatever information you get out of the API.
I think the two most important pieces of information are knowing what your programming background is (what do you mean by a "technical" background?) and also what your goals are.
If you have a programming background, you'll want to figure out the tools you have within that language that allow you to use HTTP requests (PUT/GET/POST). I used the requests package for Python. There were a lot of basics here that I needed to understand to get started, and I don't know whether the Canvas-specific guides will be of much help there. If you use a different language, I'm sure someone around here can help you with those things.
If you don't have a programming background, it's a bit more complicated because you're kind of learning two things at the same time. I won't say more about that here, but it basically pushes this conversation in a completely different direction.
But regardless of your programming background, the other question you need to be able to answer is "What do I want to do with the API?" And maybe your answer is that you don't know and you just want to explore. That's kind of like saying, "I want to do arts and crafts" but not knowing what sorts of crafts you want to make and you're open to try anything. In that case, you might just try to learn how to do simple things that have already been done, and that's perfectly acceptable as a starting point. Basic things you can do are get a list of your courses, send a message, and add a new page to an existing course. And as you start to do those things, you might start to imagine how to combine them together in some way that's useful to you. (By the way, my first project was "Make a gradebook" which I thought would be easy but turned out to be more complicated than I imagined. But I still learned from it, and that's really all that matters.)
If you have a particular goal in mind, you need to figure out whether the commands exist for you to do that. And you can read a bunch in the documentation, but it's probably quicker to just ask. Sometimes, things are not organized in the way you might initially guess. Although I haven't interacted on this community a ton, I've found it to be supportive and helpful, even if you're not completely making sense or completely understanding what's happening.
Good luck!