Ideas for learning to write good networking code

[Corwin]

I like to program and I like to play games, but I'm mostly interested in multiplayer games. I would really like to make some of my ideas a reality but I really don't know how to write networking code. I was wondering if anyone has seen some good free resources that would help me learn.

[Roots]

Tah-dah!

http://www.gamedev.net/reference/list.asp?categoryid=30

I have almost zilch network programming experience myself. I only wrote a small chat program and an online SQL database interface in Java, but that's it. Its definitely something I'd like to study on my own one day.

[Dizzutch]

what worked for me to learn the basics and the principles of network programming was to do it in perl. Since in perl writing to a socket it much like writing a file, it takes away the problems of syntax. When i got comfortable with the idea I switched to writing network code in C/C++ or whatever. Then you can focus on the details that C lets you change, but since you're not worried about the content, you can alocate a lot more focus on that part. For starters, I'd reccommend a simple chat-client, a simple webserver (HTTP protocol is pretty simple when it comes to implementing the basic functions) and maybe a FTP-client/server.
Good Luck,
Dizz

[Corwin]

Thanks for the suggestions.