Ok, here I am. I am goin through this Teach Yourself Visual C++ book (for the second time) and I decided I'm going to go further with one of the lessons, a socket application. I want to make it an FTP/IRC application. It connects wonderfully. Heres the problem, I need to be able to recognize commands sent back and forth, but I dont have a clue how to modify strings, for instance, if I want to add m_strMessage to the end of m_strNick. How do I do that? Or determine if /nick is at the beginning of a message. I'm not asking anyone to write a book for me here on the message board, but I would appreciate a point in the right direction (web link, etc..) Thanks.