Most of your graphics knowledge needs can probably be satisfied at the first ULR on this month's suggestions.
The Macromedia Exchange site can save you a lot of time. Do not reinvent the wheel.
Dark Basic. I think its not regular basic. Far from it. This is something oriented to games development.
MS .NET. Changes are coming. Are they for good? Are they for bad?
Computer Science WEBLOG for October 2000
http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/home/mxr/gfx/ - Did you ever wonder how could you reverse engineer a JPG file to write your own JPG reader? And what about GIF, BMP, PCX, etc... How can you understand all those file formats?!
Hint: don't bother re-engineering them; just visit the URL above, where everything is explained.
http://www.eekim.com/software/cgihtml/index.htm - I still didn't start that long promised CGI tutorial (but it is getting closer...), so I can't but recommend you these functions for those who, like myself, have the opinion that nothing comes close to C performance. CGIHTML is on version 1.69 and delivers easy CGI programming.
http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~jhammer/classes/5725/ - Using SYBASE V11, this is the homepage for an university course on database management systems. The page itself won't teach you much, but it links to some useful learning resources.
http://www.macromedia.com/exchange/ - Reinventing the wheel is not a smart thing to do. So, whenever you are thinking about developing a new technology for use with Macromedia's superb Dreamweaver (and Dreamweaver UltraDev), check the Exchange initiative first - someone else might already have done it.
http://www.darkbasic.com/ - Dark Basic is a new language, very much oriented towards game development. I never used Dark Basic, so I can't tell you if I find its technology worth the learning. This tool reached a considerable popularity, after a PC GAMER (UK) magazine contest, where everyone was invited to do a car racing game in 24 hours.
http://www.microsoft.com/net/ - Microsoft has many novelties ready for release with its smashing Visual Studio 7 development environment. Among the news, there will be C# (it reads "C Sharp") and a new (daring) attitude towards the Internet, as an infrastructure to deliver services and not just passive files. Start reading about it.
http://www.artbyte.com/ - Quite a strange magazine. It looks cool, it reads cool, but I think it still isn't different enough to attract people from the communities that matter: developers, designers, gamers and net-surfers. I bought two magazines and they are kind of unbalanced: one is great, the other is déjà-vu... The website is also too FLASHy, and I can't understand why it has the intro it has...
CGI can be done in any language, but because it is a server side thing, you'd better stick to fast C code. Here is a library to do it.
DBMS are a strange subject. The line between what's technology driven and what's tech independent is very thin, and you risk on go learning something that won't be useful the next year.
This is the flashy intro for the Artbyte website. Go visit that web - you might learn something different, although I find the magazine a bit irregular.