Guidelines for building a packet sniffer O_o

[CodeBlox]

Hi, I'm pretty familiar with and have a good understanding of C++ as well as C. I am a Computer Science major in College. Anyway, I was wondering if anyone good point me in the direction needed to develope a simple packet sniffer to sniff on an interface. I under stand you have to create a raw socket, then bind it to an interface and start sniffing. But thats where it ends. I don't know what libraries I should be using to create this in Windows. Could someone suggest libraries to develope one in Windows AS WELL as for Linux?

I don't want anyone to write it for me, just give me sort of a guide to put me in the right direction.

[skval]

There are many ways to do that.
You can create a raw socket.
but you also can do this by communicating with the network driver.(winpcap library is example to that).
you can start from http://www.winpcap.org/misc/faq.htm

good luck.