If you want to do something simple, read Beej's Guide to Networking (many other have recommended it in this thread) to learn networking fundamentals and C APIs.

If you want to do something simple, read Beej's Guide to Networking (many other have recommended it in this thread) to learn networking fundamentals and C APIs. Next, learn about HTTP - MDN is a good resource, but may go too in depth for this project at times. HTTP 1.1 is super simple. The best thing about HTTP? It's all just plain text and newlines. Parsing it is super easy. This is a good learning exercise - good luck on it.