I'm a newbie to, and as one newbie to another I know its difficult trying to decide on a starting point (there's just so much to learn lol).

I agree with the other people that have replied - you have to read and back-up that knowledge with experimentation.

I decided to first start off by getting to know as much as I could about servers (mail servers, web servers, ftp servers, etc). No-one told me this would be a good place to start but I figured "what the hell - servers are everywhere" lol.

After doing some googling and reading I downloaded some freeware servers and played about setting them up on a spare win2k box I have, then I uploaded some web-pages that I did with Dreamweaver (nothing spectacular I know but its all part of the learning curve).

I then found and read some articles about telent and thought that would tie-in nicely with my server experiments. Its amazing what you can do within one computer without even connecting to a network or internet (localhost is the clue).

Anyway - I've droned on far to much so here's the interesting link bit!!!!


http://www.software602.com/products/ls/

602Pro Lan suite - is a full-featured freeware server (you have to register it to get the advanced stuff). I found it easy to set-up and good to mess about with.

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

Putty - is a freeware telnet client - its far better than the telnet client that comes with win2k.

Telent tutorials - do a google!!!!!

cheers
humpy