Hey, so recently in my school our teacher wanted us to spend the next 2-3 weeks making up a program of our own choice. (We learned Java in class but I wanted to try something different and learn C++.) Anyway I'm a beginner at C++ and I was wondering how exactly do programs connect to websites/the internet because I wanted to make a program that would notify me of any updates/changes on a website (such as a blog, forum, etc) and provide and archive of it. What I'm really having trouble with is I have no idea how a program connects to the internet in the first place. Could anyone show me somewhere that I could learn this?

Try here. It's a nice tutorial on sockets programming.
Read my books
MiniBasic how to write a script interpreter
Basic Algorithms (in C)

# Connect to a site example
# #include<windows.h>
# #include<wininet.h>
# #include<stdio.h>
# int main()
# {
#
# HINTERNET Initialize,Connection,File;
# DWORD dwBytes;
# char ch;
# Connection = InternetConnect(Initialize,"www.xxx.com",INTERNET_DEFAULT_HTTP_PORT,
# NULL,NULL,INTERNET_SERVICE_HTTP,0,0);
#
# File = HttpOpenRequest(Connection,NULL,"/index.html",NULL,NULL,NULL,0,0);

if(HttpSendRequest(File,NULL,0,NULL,0))
{
while(InternetReadFile(File,&ch,1,&dwBytes))
{
if(dwBytes != 1)break;
putchar(ch);
}
}
InternetCloseHandle(File);
InternetCloseHandle(Connection);
InternetCloseHandle(Initialize);
return 0;
}
</stdio.h></wininet.h></windows.h>

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