It was surprisingly hard to find a simple straight forward stock API; this community built API hosted by Yahoo does the job.
Let's get to it.
Below is a complete URL example if you want to play on your own and figure it out.
http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select%20*%20from%20yahoo.finance.quotes%20where%20symbol%20in%20(%22AAPL%22)&env=store://datatables.org/alltableswithkeys