   Help with Programing Chat Rooms or Insant Messenger
  Im looking to create a chat room or a instant messenger, I might go for instant messanger only becous im learning C++ rather than other languages like java.. but im wondering if anyone has any resorces, books at amazon.. that would teach the basics of creating a chat room or instant messenger (Even if Java).. forgive my newbieness towards programing,, im still new and understand little.Why.. becouse I want to have my own chat room or instant messanger on my website, its a Pen and Paper RPG. Nothing to fancy.And neather the chatroom or messanger needs to be to fully featured.. atleast not in the beta release.. probebly just Chat Room, with 1 window for the DM and another window for Players. A Private chat feature, and file sharing. (Mayby voice chat if its easy to implement)   
  hmpf, i wanted to give you the link to a book, but then i realized it's written in german *damn* i don't recognize if a programming book is german or english O-obut i can help you anyways. an easy way to create an internet connection ( and then a server etc.. ) is using winsock. this is a class wich handles much of the low level stuff and you only have to create a class, based on winsock and call functions like xyz.Connect("Ip", Port);xyz.Listen();xyz.Accept(Socket);the problem is that this winsock class handles how many messages are sendt, because it is based on streams ( please correct me if i am wrong, i've only dealt a few times with this class to learn vc++ ). so if you send 10 messages in one function, there aren't 10 messages going out to the server / other client but one message with all 10 pasted together. this can be very unhandy if you want to create a chat programm. a quick google spits many tutorials, here is one of them.but there is another method to send messages. you don't create a connection to a single client, but you send and recieve messages to another client ( also correct me, it's not my typical programming stuff ). you won't get a message when the other client is offline etc... it's definately a lot of work to use the UDP protocoll, since there's no message, indicating that a packet has been lost, has arrived etc. there's no assurance about that, unless you proof it yourself.however there are many librarys out there, wich handle all that low level stuff and let you work the same way than with the winsock class, perhaps even more compftable. one of them is RakNet.i haven't worked with it yet, but i've read some promissing comments and i'll definately use it in my project, when i need to do multiplayer stuff...it isn't easy to create an internet application, but it's worth the effort.i was proud of myself when i send a friend of mine my simple chat programm and recieved a message from him over my prog, and not trillian / icq etc.. ^^i hope i could help you   