Hello everyone!

I want to implement something very basic:

• N users on N different computers to see a canvas with N dots. 
• Each user controls a single dot with his arrow keys
• Each user can see all other users' (and his own) dots moving around.
• Once a user connects, a corresponding dot appears.
• Once a user disconnects, the corresponding dot disappears.

 Can you please suggest tutorials, guides and frameworks for me to start learning to implement this?

P.S. I'm a CS graduate, my career path is Real Time / Embedded software, no real work with web / servers before. So if you can suggest relevant courses / bodies of knowledge that are required for this sort of thing, I would be most grateful

Thanks!

It may look basic, but it isn't, since it involves communication between computers.

You may want to head over to the networking forum to discuss the communication problem. As a start, TCP/IP network communication looks feasible here (and is the simplest). At the client-side you need to handle input from the network and the user, and display something on the screen. You can do this in nearly infinitely many ways, anything from a web-browser to a full-blown game engine to a gui application to a plain console application.

Also, you didn't mention what programming languages you know, although something C-ish seems likely given your path. As a first shot I'd suggest use Python, but you may want to discuss this in follow-up posts when you give your language knowledge and preferences.

At the server-side (which could be a client as well of course), you have connections from all users that you have to deal with. It's simpler in the sense that there is no gui and no user input to deal with. Again, any language will do, find stuff about handling multiple network connection in your preferred language, "select" is the term to look for at unixy systems, ie select(2).

Thanks for the reply Alberth!

I mentioned my career path only to emphasize that I'm a stranger to higher level tools and lingo, but I'm not constricted to any language or paradigm, just need guidance on what to learn

I will take it to the networking forum as you suggested, but a ready tool /  framework would be good as well to begin with.

I have found PubNub, that sells a ready product, which is good, and I would also like to knwo how to do something like this myself