Well, I'd say that your first program should be "Hello World!", and then you should write smaller programs and gradually work your way up to writing a a database for something with a good user-interface, then toss in sockets and make it web-accessible. Once you have that up and running, re-write it from scratch. If you can do that then you know almost all aspects of programming and you'll be a much desired asset. Of course, I know nothing about programming, so I'll shut my lame-assed script kiddie mouth about it and leave the much superior NoNeckJoe to answer your question.