New to code (Very new!) and looking for a little project, but needs some help

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Im not gonna pretend like I’m good with code, because I really only started to get into it a day ago. (I’ve been looking into it for a long time but only started testing myself yesterday). Really I’ve been testing myself with some C, just making some basic math programs and stuff like that. Adding some special cookies so if the number you calculate comes out to a specific number it will say something funny. (Ex. If you get 666 it will read a message that says “Hail Satan!”) haha…. But I’m calling on this community for a little help into where exactly I should be looking for.. well more tutorials :P.

I wanna make a program… that for the most part is pointless, but I just want to make it to test myself a little bit. I want to make a simple PING program. Here is the format I want to try and make the program into.

Prompt 1: Pleas enter the IP address or the URL of the host/server you would like to PING:

Prompt 2: Pleas enter the number of PING’s you would like to send to this host/server:

Prompt 3: Pleas enter the size of the packets in bytes:

<output results>

I have an odd feeling in my gut that this will be fairly simple… But like I said I only started a day ago, and am just looking for a little guidance. (By the way, should I continue through and learn the rest of C, or go straight through to C++?) And also like I said before this is really only a program I want to make to test myself. I’m shur that the majority of people who know what “PING” is knows how to PING something using normal command prompt…. But yeknow… Looking to test myself.
Thanks to anyone who can help a n00b like me! Its greatly appreciated!

(Also, I apologize for any spelling/grammar mistakes I have made. :P )

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Hey dude,

C is a quite an undertaking as a first go at programming. C++or C# first and then going back to C (if there a specific reason for it) might be an easier learning curve.

Or you could look at other non compiled programming languages like Python, Perl and Ruby. All the choices have really good tutorials and communities around them so finding help is easy.

If you wanted a really cool C project, start with getting ping to work. Don't use C to pass commands to the system then read back the output, go deeper. Ping is an open connection to a target with ICMP packets. You could start by figuring out how to open a connection in C, build your packet and then transmit it. There are also different types of ping's so you could play with those. Once you've mastered that, try to spoof the source address and go from there. hping is a similar tool that I use quite often in network testing. Who knows, maybe your project could turn out to be pretty useful. I know it looks like a lot, but baby steps all the way.

Have a read through this too: http://beej.us/guide/bgnet/output/html/multipage/index.html

Best of luck with it.

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Have to chime in because people often say C++ is easier than C. It's not. C++ is C with OOP and templates. C is cleaner and easier (especially for a beginner).