Creating a pager for data retrieved from views.get

Greetings,
I have an application which connects to a Drupal site via the JSON service. This application displays results from a view that contains roughly 700+ items. Rather than retrieve every single result, I'd like to only retrieve around 20 and implement a pager. My attempts to do this thus far have failed and I could really use some guidance :)

I noticed that there is a limit and offset argument that the documentation says is used for paging. The documentation also states that only 1 or the other can be used. What I don't understand is how you can implement paging without using both. If I wanted a 20 entry pager I'd want my limit to be 20 and my offset to be Current_Page * Limit, right?

Also, how can I retrieve the count of items in the view without actually getting them? Without this final count, it'd be impossible to create a pager that shows page numbers etc.

Any guidance would be highly appreciated!

-Shaun