   Next Step
  I am an amatuar programmer who knows about:memoryvariablesnumeric operatorslogical operatorsif and elseswitchfor loopand the while loop.I have only programmed text based programs.What do i do now?   
  functions and pointers would be the next chapters, then classes and templates if you go with C++.After that I would start looking into the STL library. Get used to stuff like vector, stack, list, map, iterators and how to do operations on them, like sort and find.At the same time you could pick some API and start playing with it, like Win32 API.   ;  Thats a pretty vague question. What language are you using? Where have you been learning from? How long have you been learning? What sort of text based programs have you made?   ;  If you're feeling confident enough, you should try a few basic windows / GUI-based programs. These are harder as they use classes, and startup code etc, and you will have to learn the ins and outs of API calls, but they are more interesting, and will give you good experience. Hope that helps   ;  What's API???   ;APIIts usually no more than some h/cpp files compiled into libraries (lib/dll) files.