I need to do the following things and am asking for help in locating resources as to how to go about doing them:
1. 'Crawl' a Windows network and get the location, filename and filesize of all media files.
2. Interact with a mysql database to store selected information about the files, to produce reports, and to perform searches.
3. (Do some other interesting things in indexing the files which I will worry about once I get the basics working).
I have experience creating basic win32 applications, but no experience using win32 for any of the above things.
I will be creating my own C++ wrapper classes where needed, and so I am fine using existing code in either C or C++ (but do not want to use any MFC).
So, what I am requesting is information about what APIs and libraries you recommend I use to do (1) and (2). If win32 happens to already provide support for doing these things, then I would appreciate it if you would mention a few relevant method calls to help my searches.
I would really appreciate freely available information, as I can not afford to buy any books at this point (I am a student). If you do mention books though, I might be able to find them in the CS library.
Thank you folks.