Shell Code ... Maybe Some Links?

I've come across a lot of exploit articles online, and I've noticed a lot of them involve shell code. I've attempted to Google for tutorials/explanations, but I can't find anything for a beginner.

By "beginner" I don't mean new to programming. I've been writing software in C++ for about 10 years now, and C# for about 3 years, and I know a small amount of Java. I'm not new to the programming scene.

I just need some links to articles that some of you might have. I need something that can explain in pretty good detail how/why it works, and how to convert something into shell code.

Thanks!

You need to know about buffer overflows and how to exploit them. Just search Google about this. You can look at this http://insecure.org/stf/smashstack.html

Thanks, I bookmarked it and I'll read it later tonight.

Here's another link that might help you:

http://darkc0de.com/tutorials/shellbegin.pdf