$.Deferred and Promises

I've been beating my head against $.Deferred and Promises for awhile now, ever since working on Rebecca Murphey's JS Assessment. I think I managed to stumble through the assessment, but I didn't really understand what I was doing. I just knew that Deferred/Promises were used for async management... I think.

Since then, I didn't really think to bother using Deferred/Promise until working on a project for work today. I wanted to do something like the following:

Get a session key via ajax
When successful, use the key to instantiate the client
Get a list of objects according to some criteria (this would be done asynchronously, via an API)
From that list of objects, load some kind of media 

All the articles I read today used ajax/xhr as a prime example, which was helpful for my ajax call. However, I was pretty clueless how to Deferred/Promise-ize the call that asynchronously loads the objects through the API. After some trial and error, here's what I came up with:

var step1 = $.ajax(...);
step1.done(... instantiate client ...);
step1.fail(... failed ...);

var step2 = step1.then(
  function(data) {
    return getListAsync();
  },
  function(err) {}
  );

var step3 = step2.then(
  function(data) {
    return loadData(data);
  },
  function(err) {}
  );

function getListAync() {
  var def = $.Deferred();
  def.done(function(result) {
    // do some stuff
    return result.objects;
  });

  var callback = function(args) {
    def.resolve(args);
  };

  theAsyncAPI.someCall(callback, arg1, arg2, arg3);
  return def.promise();
}

I have no idea if there is a better way to do this, so hopefully as I keep working on this, I'll figure it out better. At least it doesn't seem so confusing now. :)