ESP8266 Community Forum

I lurked on this forum a little bit and decided to join today. I'm a 2nd yr C++ developer, and do some microcontroller programming as well. I'd like to do a few ESP8266 projects now, nothing fancy to start just sending digital IO status from the ESP and receiving it to the PC.
But .... I'd like to do it directly between the computer and ESP and haven't been able to find anything online about using soft AP that way.
So far I've done the basics, I blinked the LED, I connected to the ESP securely through wifi and now I'm kind of stuck.
If someone would be kind enough to point me in the right direction I'd appreciate any suggestions, right now I'm looking at MQTT since I found some C++ API stuff for MQTT that looks promising so I've been poking wildly at Mosquitto trying to make it work.
I'm working with:

Linux
Arduino IDE
A stand-alone USB programmer
ESP12F modules
ESP01 modules

Thatnks in advance.

As you are new so now you should work on webserver. Create web server in both Access Point and web socket mode.

Display sensors data on servers and control your devices and yeah you mentioned right MQTT PRotocol would be best for this.

I think this tutorial will help you a great deal: https://www.theengineeringprojects.com/ ... -mqtt.html

Here they have used ESP32. ESP32 is an advanced version of ESP8266. Same code runs in both the modules. So, first learn whats MQTT and then design your application. Quite easy as everything's auto implemented, we just need to compile.

I love MQTT.
I have mini MQTT servers in the form of Raspberry Pi Zero W at work and Pi3 for at home.

Let me know if you still need help. I'm not on here much since my favorite hobby is to build and fly a FPV drone.
Dougie on the Raspberry Pi community is a great source of knowledge. With both Pi and MQTT.