C programming preferred in network programming

I'm currently teaching myself how to code web clients and/or servers be it udp wise or tcp socketing but I'm having trouble finding some adequete resources in doing so. If anything, I am mainly having trouble knowing the commands and function libraries that would enable the code to ping a random website for example. I attempting to write some of the unix commands from scratch such as the ping, curl, traceroute, wget, just to name a couple. Any information or sources that could lead me in the right direction will help me greatly.