Dear Experts

I started teaching myself pure C at the beginning of the year by reading books like "K&R The C programming language", "Programming Windows by Charles petzold" and various others, aswell as the internet.

So far I have a fairly good knowledge, I can write GUI apps using the WinAPI. I have a massive interest in network programming and have written a file transfer app. Also a basic chat server/client using the powerful select() call on both unix and windows.

My main weakness tho comes down to two things really, the lack of using structs in my code, obviously I know what structs are but have never written anything which really needs them (apart from the WinAPI structures to pass through functions) I don't write my own, except for example my file transfer app, storing the file name and size in a structure and send()ing it over to the receiving end. I need some ideas on how I can improve this, maybe look into abit of game programming?

The second is string parsing, I sometimes can find this hard using the standard C library, for example filtering out specific lines of text between HTTP tags. I need to improve this aswell any ideas ?

The big question is, am I ready to start learning C++ and MFC ? or do my current skills need to be better ?