i actually want to write a program which keeps a watch on which and when a user is accessing sites on the internet.
will i have to learn tcp/ip programming for this??
if so..
i want to know in which language is it programmed..
kindly guide me..

Depends on if you want to develop it for the sake of learning to program?

Otherwise i'd use a proxy server and monitor the log files it generates.

no i want to write a program for this as i want to store these data in a database and use this for some other purpose..
so please tell me what should i learn to program this.

I dont know the answer to your problem. ANd i am sorry but something sounds very suspicious and possibly illegal with what you are trying to do...


on the other hand have you tried ethereal.(ithink its called wire shark now.)

It really depends on what exactly you want to do. Not enough detail has been provided so far. You won't have to do any TCP/IP programming if you just wanna write something that analyses already-generated accessed-sites lists. If, OTOH, you want to write a program which does the generation itself, you could still use pretty much any network-capable generic programming language to do it. Maybe try a combo such as Python with Twisted. Python seems to be quite newbie-friendly and there's tons of books about it.

I'd doubt it. Even if we assume the most nefarious of purposes, its unlikely for him to be in a posistion to actually do it in a way that is truly illegal. There are scores of perfectly legitimate reasons for wanting to do this. Which although may make some uncomfortable are not in any way illegal.

For example a network admin for a coporation.

A guy running his own home network and wants to spy on his girlfriend, or vice versa.

The short answer is no. Because there are any number of pre-built tools out there for doing this.

The first thing that comes to mind is a firewall. A good dedicated firewall will do exactly what you want and more.

Another option is having the computer in question use a proxy server then running the logs thru any number of scripts and programs out there to analyze the logs. I use squidalyse myself.

If you wanted something a little more custom tailored, then perhaps a combination of ethereal and using perl scripts to parse that data into something meaningfull and using python tools to get that data into mysql. Then using php and html to report on that data.

Then of course there are the actual networking monitoring suites out there. If you had the money or some means otherwise of aquiring those programs.

there are many available. Search for Web monitoring in google.
if you want to start a internet monitoring software from scratch, then yes

If you are referring to software, then which programming language, that supports tcp/ip APIs can do it.
If you are talking about how tcp/ip is coded in your *nix OS, then you have to learn some C/C++.

Depends on what you want to accomplish. I have written "guardians" that listen to many different ports on my server installation and they report every attempt to enter, sort them and store in a database used to report abuse attempt to the internet providers that are used by those who make the intrusion attempts. Programs have been written in any language at hand, Perl, C, C++, Java, Python. I'm not religious in programming and use whatever is working on the actual computer.
In java it was something like 20 lines of code to store info about the intrusion attempt, if I remember correctly.

preparably the lang can use c++ or java