I have been working on Magento for the last few months. I want to develop modules in Magento but my question is how can I start to develop for it?
1) What are some of the basic needs to create a module?
2) What type of xml files settings need to develop module and why?
If someone could also provide a diagram of the overall architecture of a Magento module, that would be great.
You can find here a nice tutorial: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/03/01/basics-creating-magento-module/.
This one is nice also: http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/magento-custom-module-development--cms-20643.
There are a lot of resources like this online. If only there was a tool to search for them...
If you are a beginner, you can use a module creator.
You will use it even if you are an advanced magnento developer because you don't want to do the same thing over and over again.
I can recommend you this one: https://github.com/tzyganu/UMC1.9. It's pretty advanced and does a lot of stuff, not just a simple module.
Or this one. http://www.silksoftware.com/magento-module-creator/. This has the advantage of being on online and you don't have to install anything to use it.