I'm certainly not a lawyer either, but was forced to read up on things a bit before releasing HS-aholic.
The key part of any copyright violation claim is damage to the companies image/profits. So, any item created for personal use only should be 100% fine (anyone willing to put in the effort to create their own was most likely never going to purchase the official item). However, as soon as you distribute or sell the item you would be in complete violation.
The real catch is not wanting to show off your software when you complete it. Host a tourney that uses your awesome software instead of the official game pieces and you're definitely in violation, but its a hard temptation to pass up showing off cool software after all the work it takes to make.
For anyone wanting to learn to code I'd recommend the iPhone & Android SDKs. Both are very popular atm, which means there is a wealth of official and community resources available to help you learn it.
The iPhone uses objective-c (by far the friendliest c-variant I've ever personally used) and Android uses java (the most popular language used by colleges).
Another good option to simply get your feet wet is to spend some time learning the ropes with some scripting. Some simple vbscript work can be a great way to start (completely free and built into windows simply create a text file and change the extension to .vbs or .hta depending on what your making). The w3schools website is a great vbscript resource.
Even writing well-formed HTML/XML can be a good exercise for a beginner. And if your really into the web you can learn Flash (many claim its very easy to learn, but I've never personally had interest in it).
Personally I started with c/c++ and although I was forced to learn java back in college I've always had a serious prejudice against its clunkiness (think game engines) and I'm very OCD about code so the 'flexible' languages like java tend to cause me serious irritation since many coders are extremely lazy/impatient when it comes to structure and documentation. (Yes you can create really crappy c code, but it'll almost always fail which is a good deterrent against such behavior.
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On the other hand many c-variants are poorly equipped for handling more modern features (UTF chars & networking come to mind) and the c-style syntax can be challenging for beginners. Beyond that the error reporting of c compilers is plain dismal (this forces you to code very carefully or spend massive amounts of time debugging), while other languages like java tend to have excellent debug output in comparison.