Graphing project

Hi, I'd need some hints on how to program a coordinate system. I've been searching for tutorials all over the web but haven't managed to find any (surprising, isn't it?) I'm not asking you to write the whole stuff, but to give me something useful to get going. What I'm about to build allows the user to input minimum and maximum values for x & y shown on the graph and also scale values etc. As I have only little experience on graphics programming, this seems quite difficult. Also if you know any tutorials on web (doesn't really matter what language, Java, C/C++, Visual Basic goes fine too - as long as I get the idea). Thanks in advance, Markus