I am working on building a scheduler which runs tasks at specified times. In this regard, I felt it would be good to know how the cron daemon works. I Googled, but didnt really get much insight into what actually happens. Can I get some directions as to where I can get information on the same?

Ermmm, the cron deamon IS a scheduler which runs tasks at specific times. Why would you want to build a new one?

could you not check out the source of crond or at

Like your tagline

When cron is started or made to reread it's config, it examines all the config files, parses them and
stores this info in memory.
In a loop that runs every minute (==the finest time granule allowed), it checks if any jobs need to run
and if there are, it runs them (using a special environment setting and running as the user who submitted the job).

But, I agree with baldy that you should stick with cron/at if you can. There is no need to make your own.
If you do have a system without a scheduler/cron, you may consider building it from it source.

If I understand correctly, cron is one of many "daemons" that run in background to keep the system functioning. All of these have the common feature that they continuously check **something** to see if an action is required. An obvious example is the daemon that watches for keyboard input in a terminal.

cron simply watches the clock and checks against the instructions in crontab to see what needs to be run for any given time.