You should be able to use the skill_tree API method to get the names, but the Database dump is probably the most efficient. You can use it for more than that too. Check out http://wiki.eve-dev.net or the #eve-dev IRC channel on irc.coldfront.net as there are a lot of people with knowledge about all this.

Good luck.

I’m currently working on implementing some stuff for my eve fan site but wonder how one can easily grab stuff like skill names etc from the data dump (as that is the only place where it can be fetched from right?). I guess importing a data dump to a database and fetch stuff from that would work, but it does create some overhead and maybe not the simplest thing that could work. Any ideas how to do this in a more lightweight way?

Cheers,
Christer Bermar